Galileo Pilgrimage: A Teacher's Trek

This past summer, John Nord, a high school math teacher from Saint George’s School in Spokane, WA, participated in the Hilton HHonors Teacher Treks Program in Italy. He went to see the sights and sounds that inspired Galileo to invent and discover.  He visited to Pisa, Florence, and Venice during his Trek. Find out more about John’s experience in the following interview.

My Galileo pilgrimage took me to the Galileo Museum (they have Galileo’s finger in a jar and his telescopes), Santa Maria Novella (where priests proclaimed all math teachers to be heretics), and Galileo’s tomb at Santa Croce in Florence. While in Pisa, I climbed the stairs to the top of the Leaning Tower (Galileo dropped objects of various sizes off of the top to prove that gravity acted independently from mass) and visited the duomo (cathedral) where he studied the swinging lamps and worked out the basic principles of pendulums. Venice is amazing. Galileo’s theory of tides predicted there should be only one high tide per day. I can report that there are in fact two high tides per day in Venice and they are slowly swamping the city.

I was truly inspired by Hilton’s approach. I ask students daily to dream big. Hilton took that one step further. They asked teachers to imagine that if they could go anywhere and study anything, where would they go and what would they study? Dream big indeed! Galileo invented modern science in the face of the Inquisition in the heart of Italy. We imagine all of the problems in the modern world are unique. But even if the problems are unique, the methods of solving them, even in the face of huge opposition, are quite similar to what Italians witnessed in the 1600’s.  

This is actually a great question. My pre-trip answer was that I would reproduce the pendulum experiments and have my algebra students push through from the data collection to the formulation of a theorem using original location photos to inspire and motivate the project. I will still do that. But it turns out that traveling to Italy and wandering around in Florence created far more opportunities to impact students. This goes to the heart of travel to "Opening minds to the world." One example of an unplanned teachable experience pertains to my Business Calculus. The street vendors in Florence aggressively pursue tourists. Their ‘business plan’ now forms the basis of many of my introductory examples in revenue modeling.   

Dream big! I greatly appreciate Hilton and IIE for allowing me to do something that I would not have otherwise been able to ever do.