Behind the Scenes of StarCourses: Lesson Planning With Celebrity Instructors

Of all the things to love about writing for Nerdy, one of the best is the occasional necessity of taking the time to truly live up to the Nerdy ethos—that is, absolutely obsessing about learning fascinating subjects. In order to help parents effectively educate their kids and to help kids nurture their own passion for learning, we have to practice what we preach, right?

In my quest to dive into the most fascinating topics, feed my inner nerd, and find new ways for learners to immerse themselves in subjects that inspire curiosity and wonder, I just hit the jackpot and need to shout it from the rooftops: I’m co-writing lessons about space travel with an astronaut! 

I’m breaking down the brain with a famous neuroscientist!

I’m emceeing lessons on wellness with a gold medalist! 

I’m co-hosting fitness routines with a Dancing With The Stars legend! 

And if that all seems as farfetched to read as it did for me to initially hear, here’s the reason: through some crazy stroke of luck, I got to be the teacher who nerded out with these experts as they developed their Virtual School Day classes.

I love my job.

And if you’re interested in hearing more about what it’s like to talk about space with a NASA astronaut or about neuroscience with an acclaimed actress? Well, let’s nerd out.

Chasing space

I can still remember the filmstrip (and portable projector) that I must have brought home from the Bird Elementary School library at least 20 times as a kid. It was all about the future of space travel and the idea that someday humans might even have a colony where we can live in space. So when I got word that my first project for these celebrity classes would be to meet with astronaut Leland Melvin—who himself had spent some time living on the International Space Station—I couldn’t believe it. As I told Leland on our first call, I still brag that I merely know someone who once met Buzz Aldrin. Now, Leland and I were going to spend time together talking about how a shuttle launch feels, how the earth looks from afar, and what it’s like hurtling at 17,000 miles per hour back toward home on a collision course with the atmosphere.

What’s amazing to me about talking to people who have lived a dream like going to space is the calm in their voice when they talk about it. What might sound like nonchalance if you casually heard part of the conversation is really just sheer ownership of their craft. They’ve executed those steps so many times—in practice and for the main event—that it really does slow down for them. When they talk about those experiences, they describe the seemingly-impossible in such calm, matter-of-fact detail.

And that’s Leland. Don’t get me wrong: he’s so enthusiastic, so warm, and so friendly. But to hear him talking about seeing the orange and purple glow surrounding him as his space shuttle Atlantis burned through the atmosphere at temperatures of 3,000 degrees, he’s just so cool, calm, and collected. 

“People talk about how cool rock stars and NFL quarterbacks are, but I’d argue there may be nothing cooler than listening to an astronaut calmly talk you through the steps of docking a rocket at the International Space Station, each of them moving at 15,000 miles per hour miles above the earth.”

Anyway—I won’t tell you all his stories because he’s going to be telling them live as part of Virtual School Day. But I will say this: there’s no better way to nerd out than by watching Leland tell you about his experiences or talk you through his incredible database of images from space.

All about that neuron

One of our core philosophies at Nerdy is that knowledge is intrinsically interesting in and of itself. Even if you’re not a pilot or aerospace engineer, for example, it’s still very cool to understand how planes soar through the sky. So, for me, talking to Mayim Bialik about neuroscience was particularly fun. Around the same time I was carrying filmstrips about space home on the school bus, Mayim was the young star of one of TV’s most popular shows, Blossom. 

Now, for many of us, being the title character of a wildly popular NBC show—Mayim’s Blossom ran immediately after Will Smith’s The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and on the same network as Jerry Seinfeld’s, well, Seinfeld—would be the career peak, or at least the entire career path. We go to college and graduate school as stepping stones to our dream job, not (generally) as a reason to take a break from the dream job. But Mayim earned a bachelor’s degree and then a PhD in neuroscience in-between starring roles on hit sitcoms, which to me makes her education that much more impressive. She didn’t do it because she needed to. She did it because she was so fascinated with the human brain that she just had to learn more. 

A note about working with celebrities (a field that’s pretty new to me)—with any new partnership with a company or institution, there are several agents on the initial call. We at Varsity Tutors couldn’t just look up a number and call our favorite astronauts or actresses. We had to contact an agent, who then contacted their agents, and through a handful of relayed messages, eventually we’d set up a call. 

The talent agents who helped us set up initial conversations with our celebrity instructors also ran me through a tutorial on how to talk to famous creative types. And one piece of advice I got was to avoid "typecasting" these stars—don't immediately fit them into a tiny box based on characters they’d played or other roles the public narrowly knew them for. Just as anyone likes to try new things and learn new skills, creatives often like to use partnerships like these to show the world that they're talented in and passionate about other things. 

With that in mind, I entered this call wanting to make sure I didn't push Mayim too hard for a class on neuroscience; she had played a neuroscientist on The Big Bang Theory for several years, and the show had only ended recently, so it seemed like that subject was a candidate to break this unwritten Hollywood rule. At the same time, I was fascinated with her fascination with the human brain. So I nervously told her how cool I thought it was that she took time off from acting to dive so deep on neuroscience… and in doing so, I realized I had nothing to be nervous about.

I can’t tell you (but I’m sure she can) which part of her brain that statement stimulated, but when she got talking about all the different lessons she could teach about neuroscience and asked pointed questions about how the classroom technology might help her bring those concepts to light, well… weeks later, my cheeks still hurt from smiling. And, naturally, Mayim took less than 48 hours to send over two detailed lesson plans full of diagrams of the brain and spine, questions for students to answer, and detailed breakdowns of brain functions.

If you’re fascinated by the brain, you should absolutely take Mayim’s class to feed that curiosity. But if you’re not, I recommend the class all the more—talking to Mayim about neuroscience gives you such a deep appreciation for the most amazing computer ever created, so there’s no better way to stoke your interest in the only machine in the world that has the capacity for curiosity.

Wellness, balance, flexibility, and motion

There’s a famous quote attributed to Albert Einstein: “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” Even when you think you know something really well, there’s always more to learn, so when you know you don’t know something well, it can be both challenging and humbling. For me, activities that require balance, coordination, and rhythm fall squarely in that “things I know I don’t know” bucket. So of course I was intimidated when, on the same day, I was scheduled to talk for the first time with champion gymnast Aly Raisman and Dancing With the Stars legend Julianne Hough. Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t nervous talking to Leland about space or Mayim about neuroscience—but those were subjects I could study for, like the countless midterms and finals I got myself ready for over the years. I could do enough research to ask smart questions and anticipate some of the answers. But balance beams and dance steps? How do you study for that?

That’s where the Nerdy ethos really came into play, in two big ways:

• It’s all about being passionate about learning new things and having a growth mindset. My job wasn’t to tell them what to teach, it was to ask curious questions and help create a lesson plan that makes learning possible.

• Few things are as exhilarating as talking to a true expert about something they’re passionate about. Passionate teachers involve the learners at the learners’ level, and both Aly and Julianne fit that “passionate teachers” model to a T.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from being nervous. As I was introducing Julianne to the concept of Virtual School Day, I mentioned, “Feel free to cut me off if I’m talking too much,” but she quickly replied, “I love talking to people who are passionate, so please keep going!” And that’s how our partnership was formed: she’s passionate about (among other things) dance, fitness, motion, and creativity, and I’m passionate about teaching and making new knowledge available to as many students as possible. 

The call with Aly was eerily similar. And it made sense, because the common ground was being passionate, giving students an opportunity to learn something potentially life-changing, and making enthusiasm-fueled expertise available to all.  

What I’m most excited about when it comes to the passion and enthusiasm of these celebrity teachers is how motivated they are to make it come alive for students. The vast majority of our lesson planning conversations have been dedicated to making classes as interactive and memorable as possible for students. Whether it’s Leland Melvin asking if he can wear his space suit on camera or Aly Raisman thinking about all the stressful situations that kids face in adolescence and how to give them tools to conquer them, the StarCourse instructors have been inordinately thoughtful about how to connect with students and how to make these lessons meaningful to students’ lives.  

If you’ve read this far, it’s probably pretty clear that I think these classes are an amazing opportunity for students to learn from and interact with some of the most engaging, passionate, and, yes, famous experts on the planet (well, not always on the planet). If you’re interested in space, neuroscience, movement, or wellness, you can check out the schedule of classes here.

Brian Galvin is the Chief Academic Officer at Varsity Tutors.