Wallowing in that
ineradicable streak of Adult Educator I attended the annual meeting of
UALL, the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning. (Of course I'm being a little flippant; I'm currently Vice-Chair of UALL's Scottish wing, SUALL). I heard presentations on topics like older adults learning (how, why do people really learn in their 80s and 90s?); patterns of learning, and indeed life more broadly, in cities; "work-based" learning (which might be a way into work as well for people in work), etc. Some of them were more relevant than others to
details of my own work but all had some interesting ingredient. I particularly enjoyed hearing from some of Leeds'
Learning Champions, mature students who are happy to act as advocates, to tell their "I did it, so can you" stories to people who might be thinking of study themselves. We have a lot of these stories among our own Access students and I was left wondering if we might start something like our own Learning Champions scheme.
My professional identity has been sliced in two. For half the week the Access programme gets my attention and I'm an adult educationalist. In the other half I'm an astrophysicist, teaching and researching. At the UALL conference I wasn't thinking too much about Astronomy but that changed suddenly and unexpectedly.
The weather was kind: brilliant sunshine, azure skies, but cold air, especially in the low late afternoon Sun. I sat on a bench in the Dean's Park replying to email (
eduroam seems to work throughout much of York city centre). Walking along Minster Yard I was already a couple of steps past this plaque when the name "Goodricke" sank in. When the deaf and dumb John Goodricke (1764-86) died at the age of 21 he had already
made a lasting mark on Astronomy. People who only ever glance casually at the sky will find the stars unwavering. They might be surprised to learn that many of them vary significantly in brightness. Goodricke made some of the earliest discoveries of such
variable stars, in particular the star Algol, in the constellation of Perseus. Every 2.87 days Algol drops to about a third of its normal brightness. It takes a few hours to fade to faintest, stays more or less this faint for a couple of hours, then brightens up again over the next few hours. This is easy to watch, once you know to look for it, and predictions of the times of minimum brightness are
available online. Together with his pal Piggott, Goodricke correctly guessed the reason for this regular fading: the eclipse of a bright star by a fainter, orbiting companion. Here's a
nice discussion of this famous star, just one more point of light to the casual eye but beautiful in its regular behaviour.
I was jolted out of my adult educator identity into my astronomer identity, a bit like those moments at the end of each episode of Quantum Leap when Sam Beckett finds himself in a different body, in a new time zone. The memories that popped up, however, were from the time when I was neither one thing nor the other but a true hybrid: an adult student, outside the Paisley Coats Observatory many years ago, saying out loud, "that star's really got brighter since we started watching"; a student on the BEd course, training to be a primary school teacher, whose project report described a very cold winter night camping on Rannoch Moor, popping out of the tent every 20 minutes for another Algol brightness estimate. Ah, the were-astronomer days.
