the assistant conductor of the Leningrad Grand Opera and the prestigious Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.
But the political turmoil leading to World War II drove Sternberg back to Vienna where, in 1938, the Nazi SS rounded him up with other Jews. Sternberg himself has said that as the result of the SS officer who interrogated him, his life was probably spared. Instead of being taken into custody, he was told to “be out [of Vienna] in forty-eight hours or a concentration camp.”5
Sternberg fled to Latvia with his wife, eventually to Stockholm, and finally on board a ship to the United States. In 1942 he found himself in New York among too many talented musicians competing for too few jobs. Aided by an organization seeking opportunities for émigré musicians and artists, he began a pilgrimage south, seeking work, eventually making his way to Waco and to Baylor where Roxy Grove, the chair of the Department of Music, hired herself a musical conductor—and the rest is the marvelous story of Sternberg’s contribution to Baylor and to Waco.
He almost immediately became Dean of the School of Music and eventually Director of the Baylor Symphony. In 1962 Sternberg became conductor of the Waco Symphony Orchestra, a post he would hold with distinction for the next twenty-five years. When he retired in 1980 as Dean of the Baylor School of Music, he left a legacy that makes him a pivotal figure in the history of Baylor’s intellectual heritage.
Conclusion
And now, as a way of drawing together some threads and to point to a moment of courage at Baylor and to support for that courage, let me conclude this way:
Professor Bill Hillis, MD (1933–2018), was persuaded in 1981 to leave his post at Johns Hopkins University to become the chair of Baylor’s Biology Department. As an undergraduate at Baylor, Bill had been encouraged to pursue medicine as a career by Professor Cornelia Smith (1895–1997), a member of the Biology Department and Director of the Strecker Museum. She graced us with her presence at Baylor until her death at the age of 101. Cornelia, by the way, was the wife of Charles G. Smith (1891–1967), Professor of English, and among the most outstanding scholars in Baylor’s history. Now Cornelia, when she was an undergraduate at Baylor, had been a student of Lula Pace (1868–1925), a member of the Baylor Botany and Geology departments. Professor Pace in the 1920s began to be attacked by the Reverend J. Frank Norris (1877–1952), the notorious pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ft. Worth. She was, he said, guilty of teaching evolution. And, in fact, she was so guilty, but to her defense came Samuel Palmer Brooks (1863–1931), Baylor’s president for 30 years.
After Pace died, Norris continued to attack Baylor and President Brooks for his support of the teaching of evolution. On the morning of October 29, 1926, Brooks was addressing Baylor students in a chapel service. During the service a messenger interrupted Brooks with the news that some businessmen had marched from downtown Waco to express their support of him and the university in the face of Norris’ ongoing attacks. At that point the businessmen began entering the hall. The students, seeing how many of them there were, began spontaneously leaving their seats, moving to stand around the walls of the auditorium, and inviting the businessmen to be seated. And how many had marched to Baylor to support Brooks? Several hundred!6 A wonderful moment in Baylor’s intellectual heritage.
References
McGlamery, Gayla. “Undeniably Ann.” Baylor Magazine (July/August 2002). https://www.baylor.edu/alumni/magazine/0101/news.php?action=story&story=7245.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956.
Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945.
Sternberg, Daniel. Oral Memoirs of Daniel Arie Sternberg. Interview by Thomas L. Charlton and Wallace L Daniel, Waco, TX: Baylor University Program for Oral History, 1981. http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/buioh/id/ 1190.
1. Mill, On Liberty, 22–23.
2. “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” Russell, History of Western Philosophy, xiv.
3. The reminiscences of Mark Scarbrough and Susan Sneed Alexander are from private online remembrances of Ann Miller, August 2006. They have been used by permission of Mark Scarbrough and Susan Sneed Alexander (given to me, the author).
4. McGlamery, “Undeniably Ann.”
5. Sternberg, Interview #7, 379
6. The October 29, 1926, event recounted to the author by Kent Keeth, former director of The Texas Collection at Baylor University.
2
An Inquiry-Based Approach to Teaching Space Weather to Non-Science Majors
Trey Cade
Science can be boring. I say that as a scientist who loves science. But sometimes it can be boring. Very often science classes (especially in my world of physics) devolve into memorizing equations and solving those equations for situations that have little resemblance to anything practical (like a block sliding down a plane). However, there is no reason why this has to be the case in our classrooms, because science can also be full of wonder, discovery, amazement, and downright really cool stuff.
The Course and Pedagogical Approach
I teach Space Weather. It’s a topic I have spent most of my professional career working in, and I think it’s tremendously interesting. After all, it’s fun to teach about solar flares, space radiation, and all the ways the sun is trying to kill us and destroy our technology. It’s also a topic that is typically only taught to physics and engineering students, because the science of space weather is grounded in space physics and it can be very complex. So when I decided I would teach a space weather course, I set a goal of broadening exposure to space weather beyond the typical physics and engineering students, which meant teaching to a larger audience that may not have a strong science or math background that would match how a course like this would typically be taught. This presented a unique challenge in teaching this topic; however, I was determined to open up this course to any student from across the university, which meant I had to assume absolutely no background knowledge or math skills beyond what a typical high school graduate would have. In presenting to these students the concepts, physical processes, and technology impacts involved in space weather phenomena, there was also a secondary goal of introducing these students to fundamental physics concepts they would need to know, as non-scientists, in understanding what we would talk about.
In determining how to teach the class, it was clear that a traditional lecture-type course would be inadequate. Studies show that “teaching by telling” is the least effective way to teach anyway, so another approach was needed.7 I decided a storytelling approach would work well for this class. My idea was that my students would learn space weather the way humanity learned space weather. The story of space weather is a fascinating tale encompassing thousands of years of human history and includes names that many people would recognize—Aristotle, Halley, Galileo, Celsius, Herschel, Kelvin, and Marconi. From early observations and theories of the aurora, to the invention of the telescope that led to realizing the sun is a dynamic object, to the first recorded solar flare in 1859, to modern-day space weather impacts, this story has the potential to capture the students’ imaginations and stir interest in a phenomenon that can significantly impact their lives. By beginning with humanity’s first interactions with space science—observing the aurora and discovering magnetism—I can lay the foundation from which a more complex science can emerge. This teaching strategy then leads to scaffolding of learning that builds from foundational to higher-level understanding