My passion for space began 12 years ago. I was in first grade, and I decided to pick up a book about space that I saw lying on the bookshelf in the classroom. It mostly showed pictures of astronauts doing things on the International Space Station, but I was hooked. It left me with an immense thirst to learn more about space.

When I came home from school that day, I rushed to my room, ran to my iPad, and opened YouTube frantically, typing “space” into the search bar. I spent hours that day watching nothing but videos about space.

By 2nd grade, I had read every space-related book in my school’s library. I loved to check out the ones that showed detailed images of the design of the International Space Station and Skylab. I could spend hours looking through those images and imagining what it would be like to be an astronaut in the pictures, living and working up there.

I learned to teach out of necessity to share my passion for space. When my past teachers taught my class about space, I noticed that they spoke without passion, treating knowledge as if it were a fact to be memorized and forgotten. I didn’t agree with learning this way. I felt learning should captivate students and make them genuinely interested in the subject.

That was why I started teaching about space. My earliest memory of teaching was in the 4th grade. We had a substitute teacher that day. Our class assignment was to read an article about space. One student asked the teacher, “How do spacecraft meet each other in space? Do they have their own gravity?” To which the teacher responded, “I don’t know. Maybe?”

I knew I had to say something at that moment, so I raised my hand, and the teacher asked, “Do you have a question?” I responded with, “No, but I have an answer.” I started talking about the process of spacecraft docking. Suddenly, another student raised their hand and had a question, not for the teacher but for me. Then more students had questions, so the teacher let me answer them all.

One day in 7th grade, the 5th grade teacher asked if I could teach her class about Mars. Then, in 8th grade, I joined an organization called “The Network” and an Italian education community discord online called “NAS” these enabled me to teach classes online. I even connected the camera on my telescope to my computer so I could give a live view of objects I was talking about. I was also interested in cryptocurrency so I started teaching classes about it too and I would hold weekly zoom info sessions on NAS about cryptocurrency and space. Through NAS I was connected to a teacher in Albania, who invited me to give a zoom lecture on cryptocurrency to her students.

Over the years with every class I taught, I learned how to be a more effective teacher and presenter. I removed almost all the words from my slides and instead spent hundreds of hours memorizing and rehearsing my presentations, focusing on trying to be the teacher I would have wanted when I was younger.

My most memorable teaching memory was entering a chaotic third-grade classroom. Suddenly, I began to teach, and the entire class grew silent. After my lesson, the teacher went up to me and said, “I have never seen them that quiet!”

Also in case you are wondering why I try to remove most of the words from my slides, it’s because they are distractions. Whenever I see a presentation when the presenter shows their slides and there are a thousands words saying exactly what they are going to say, I die inside. Because the audience reads ahead of the presenter and now they aren’t focused on what the presenter has to say. In addition to this now they have to wait for the presenter to say what they just read. Then what was the point of having the presenter when the audience could have just been emailed the presentation.

I feel if information needs to be shown on a presentation it should be done on as many slides as possible so the audience isn’t just looking around and getting distracted. They are looking at exactly what you are talking about. When you information dump onto a single slide, now the audience has to search through the dump to find what you are talking about. They also tend to get distracted and look at things that you either already spoke about or are going to speak about. Also Slides are free! It cost absolutely nothing to add more slides if you are using a presentation software! When I teach or give a presentation I tend to go through hundreds of slides so then I am always refreshing the viewers attention. I try to have enough slides that I can move to a new one every 30 seconds to a minute. Another thing that I quite like to do if I am putting a source in a presentation is to just rotate it 90 degrees as then my audience may ignore it rather than reading ahead and getting distracted. What I find interesting was a lot of what I learned in making a good presentation is also really effective in content creation.