Physical Sciences Department Gary Calderone Geology Instructor

Calderone Home Page

GLG101 | GLG103

Class Schedule & Office Hours

Field trip information

Exciting links to other Earth Science Resources

Physical Sciences Department Activities

Former Assistant Chairperson for Geology

Fall, 2004 to Spring 2006, I was the Assistant Department Chairperson for Geology. My duties include the hiring, local management, and evaluation of adjunct faculty for evening and weekend classes.

Web Site Development

At the end of the Spring 1997 semester, I began experimenting with HTML, the programming language in which "web pages" are written. I had a nasty flu at the time and was confined to my house. After becoming bored with daytime soaps and talk shows (about 10 minutes ;-), I began playing with HTML software and within two or three days had programmed the basic organization of the Physical Sciences Department Web Site. Since then, Wayne Johnson & I have been actively building and maintaining this site with two overall goals. The first is to disseminate information to our students. This information includes not only class notes, schedules, and syllabi; but also hyperlinks for students seeking educational or practical information in the Physical Sciences. Our second objective is to use the web site as a marketing tool, linking it to various search engines so that an interested web surfer may be enticed into taking courses in our programs.

Construction of the New Physical Sciences Building

The 1994 bond election earmarked funds used to construct a new Physical Sciences building which now houses the Physical Sciences and Chemistry Departments at GCC. As a member of the committee overseeing this endeavor, I have been intimately involved in nearly every phase of the project-- from the draft of Educational Specifications, to the hiring of architects, to the inspection and editing of designs, and finally, to the completion of the "punch list" items. I'm told that someday it will actually be done.

Institutional Effectiveness (IE)

The renewal of academic accreditation requires tangible demonstration of our effectiveness as an institution in educating students in our various disciplines. Toward this end, I have been working in cooperation with our department IE representatives, Dave Raffaelle and Steve Kadel, as well as with Bob Thompson and Wayne Johnson to develop objective, statistically significant measures of how well our students are learning geology. In addition, we are involved in determining how our courses meet the educational needs of our students and the community in general. This ongoing project will be continually revised and monitored as long as we teach at GCC.

UCC and GCC Center extension courses

I have worked closely with Bob Thompson, Wayne Johnson, Kim Feely, and folks at ASU-West on the logistics of offering GCC geology courses at ASU-West and the future GCC North Campus of the Maricopa Community College system. Toward this end, I have attended planning sessions in the timing of course offerings, and have toured the university to establish classroom and lab locations, faculty resources, storage facilities, computer lab facilities, and student resources. The program is now firmly established at ASUW and GCC North. I was part of the faculty rotation that served ASU-West and taught GLG101/103 there in the Fall, 1998 and Spring, 2000 semesters. We now typically have adjunct faculty serve those classes.

Service Learning

Spurred initially by discussions with Karen Conzelman and the Biology Department and facilitated by Mary Leskovsky of the Honors program, I have incorporated a service learning component into my honors coursework by having Honors students teach Earth Science concepts to groups of K-12 students within our community. The initial trials, the identification of minerals, were successful, although I'm not sure who was more nervous-- my students, or me ;-)

Community Outreach

Since I joined the faculty in 1994, I have been involved in several department "open houses" wherein we deliver short educational presentations within our specialties aimed at various audiences including "home-school" parents, teachers, and K-12 students (see Service Learning above). These presentations range from fully prepared mini-courses to impromptu and informal question and answer sessions. Such events tend to be scheduled without much notice and seem to occur with variable frequency. In addition, we often serve as the community "clearinghouse" of geological information ranging from simple questions of rock and mineral identification to more complicated geologic issues involving real estate or other community concerns. These queries are posed through almost all media, from in-person to e-mail. These services also tend to be sporadic.

New Course Development-GLG229

Bob Thompson, Steve Kadel, Pam Nelson, Stan Celestian, Wayne Johnson, and I, in cooperation with the State Articulation Task Force, have been involved in the creation of a new course for in-service teachers within our community. GLG229 is a variable credit repeatable field course designed to better prepare community K-12 teachers for teaching Earth Science by providing: (1) field trips to rock/mineral/fossil collection localities; (2) field trips to potential localities to which they may wish to take their students; and (3) field excursions designed to better their functional understanding of the geology of Arizona and the southwest. I put together the first installment of the course, a six day field excursion through central and northern Arizona and southern Utah in the pre-Summer session of 1998. The course was co-taught by me, Bob Thompson, Wayne Johnson, and Kim Feely. As an added bonus, John Winters brought a telescope so that he and Kim could embellish the nights with astronomy! With the course now established, I have been working together with other district geology teachers (notably Betsy Ivester at SCC and A.J. Lombard of MCC) to gather ideas for future course offerings.

Management/Overseer of GLG103

GLG103 is by far the largest lab course in the Physical Sciences Department with over 14 sections at about 24 students per section. This course is taught by 4-7 full and part-time instructors. For a variety of reasons (including course articulation, fairness, academic integrity, etc.), we are committed to making sure that the lab sections are equivalent in content, level of difficulty, policies, and grading practices. Consequently, Wayne Johnson and I, with guidance from Bob Thompson, have established the guidelines for GLG103 instructors to help maintain our course equivalency. This guidance includes preparation of quiz/exam sets of rocks, minerals, and maps; assembly and sharing of demonstration materials and visuals; and orchestration of field trips.