For Precalc my daughter had to make a "unit circle." At points around the circle are angles and ratios and whatnot they have to lablel. The student incorporates it into art somehow. "You might be a Star Trek family" when your daughter makes this: As a psych teacher I have shown "Enemy Within" and an ENT ep where t'Pol messes around with emotions. (Not every term, and with mandatory writing assignments, O taxpayers.) Anyone else have experience incorporating Trek into school, either on the teaching or studenting end? EDIT: any advice on adding the pic? It's hosted on my Google acct. Is that forbidden?
Week 1 of my Auditing subject at university the lecturer was doing an intro to what Auditors do, and how important it is to verify the existence of assets -- first slide he showed was the 11 foot Enterprise, and the second one was a plastic model kit. The idea being you can't rely on people's assertions of what things are -- you need to check them yourself. Definitely the highlight of that fourteen weeks I can tell you. But I got on with him as a fellow Trekkie and got a great mark -- thanks TOS. In high school I think the reason I enjoyed Shakespeare so much and did reasonably well in English was because of the dozens of TOS references -- thanks again TOS
I drove my junior high English teacher nuts because I incorporated Star Trek, as well as science and science fiction in general, into as many of my writing assignments as possible. It annoyed her greatly to see paragraph assignments, essays, poems, and short stories incorporating elements of science or science fiction, and I remember an argument I had with her when she docked me marks for capitalizing Earth. I asked her why, since she hadn't docked me for capitalizing Saturn. "Well, Saturn is a planet," she said. "So is Earth," I replied. She sighed in irritation and changed my mark. Contrast that to my first-year college sociology class... by a lucky coincidence, Orson Scott Card was going to be the guest of honor at the SF convention I was going to on Thanksgiving weekend, around the same time that I was frantically trying to figure out a topic for my term paper. My instructor, Dr. Brigham Young Card, said, "You're going to the convention this weekend, aren't you? Why don't you write your term paper about science fiction? Orson Scott Card is my cousin." (or nephew? I don't recall now which it was) You could have knocked me over with the proverbial feather. My sociology instructor was already past retirement age (67 years old) and he'd picked an argument with me in class one time over "IDIC" (he felt the idea of "infinite diversity in infinite combination" was too chaotic). I hadn't twigged that he and OSC were related, and given his attitude toward Star Trek, it was a surprise that he'd suggest I write about science fiction. Meeting Orson Scott Card was an underwhelming experience, which of course, I didn't let on to my instructor. But I was able to enjoy the convention, and breezed through writing the term paper.
I remember once we were learning about RAF Bomber Command in a university History class and we discussed how Freeman Dyson's analytic methods helped the RAF with targeting in WWII. A mention was made to what he is most known for, the Dyson Sphere, and how TNG made an episode based around this idea. I also recall the term "warp drive" being mentioned a few times in a first-year Astronomy class. And the Kirk-Uhura kiss was briefly mentioned in an American cultural studies course I took last term.