By Taylor Fernandes ‘14

A new elective offered at Sherwood this year, Astronomy is the obvious choice for students with any interest in learning about space.

The Astronomy course gives students a chance to voice what they want to learn. “I get to decide what to teach, when to teach it, and how to teach it,” said science teacher Glenn Gerhardt. “How many classes do you know of where the students actually have some input towards what gets covered in the class? Probably not too many.” Gerhardt passed out index cards on the first day of class and had students write down what they would like to learn about regarding astronomy, and tries to incorporate those ideas into the final six weeks of class, when he teaches modern astronomy. “We often end up learning about some really captivating things like black holes, wormholes and even alien life” he said.

The course offers a lot of hands on activities, such as labs and computer lab time. Gehardt also plans on a field trip to the Goddard Space Center located in Greenbelt, Maryland.