10 Questions with Talia Natoli

Talia Natoli (they/she) is a Teaching Fellow in Physics, Assistant Coach for Girls JV Soccer, Head Coach of Girls JV Tennis, and a house counselor in Stearns House. Natoli attended Smith College for their undergraduate studies, where she was involved in theatrical performances. In their free time, Natoli enjoys reading books, playing video games, taking care of plants, and spending time with their dog Clover. 

What drew you to physics, and when did you realize it was something you wanted to pursue?

When I went to college, I took a lot of different classes… and I ended up taking an astronomy course that I really enjoyed. Astronomy was this really cool intersection of storytelling and science. So I majored in astronomy, and we do a good amount of physics in astronomy. I came here as a [Teaching Fellow in Physics], and I’ve just been learning more and more about physics. 

At Smith College, you participated in Smith Shakes, performing Shakespeare every semester. How was that? 


It was really fun. [Partly because] of my parents being theater people, I grew up going to Shakespeare in the Park in Los Angeles. Maybe not my favorite playwright, but it’s some of the easiest plays to do because they’re all free. They’re in the public domain, so you don’t have to actually pay anybody to do them, which is really great. And so I was one of the founding members of Smith Shakes. It was a great opportunity for those of us who really loved Shakespeare and acting, but weren’t necessarily acting majors. A lot of us who were in Smith Shakes were English majors, History majors, there were some engineering majors, too. It gave us that outlet. 

What is the most memorable play that you have directed?

In my senior year at Smith, I directed a show called “Craters or the Making of the Making of the Moon Landing” by this really amazing playwright called Elise Wien. That was a fun experience because we got to meet with the playwright when I was in New York for a period of time… It wasn’t with Smith Shakes but with a different theater club at Smith, and we got to be in a real black box theater. I got to do more lighting stuff. We had costumes.
Because it was about the moon landing, I got to bring in a lot of my astronomy and science history background into it as well. 

How did your time at Smith College shape your experiences with the intersection of art and science? 

In high school, I was very frustrated because I wanted to do sports. I played varsity tennis in high school, and I was doing plays. And I couldn’t do both. There were semesters [when] I couldn’t do both, and it frustrated me so much that I had to choose between doing a sport and being an artist. And so I embraced this interdisciplinary approach that Smith provided me. There weren’t any graduation requirements. The only class that we had to take was a freshman seminar on how to write, and that was it. That gave me a lot of freedom to take an art history class, science class, [and] calculus class. I ended up taking Italian. I did poetry class. I did almost every department. That was a big thing that Smith allowed me to do.

You believe non-traditional educational spaces are the best for learning. Could you expand on this?

Working in a non-traditional educational space, people don’t feel pressure. When you go into your classroom, and you’re learning about physics or history, there’s this pressure to take notes, to cram it all in your head, to remember it. Once you study for a test and you take the test, [most of] the information goes out of your mind. The advantage of non-traditional education spaces is that whether you feel like you’re good at science or history or whatever, you’re still able to enjoy it. It’s more like this idea that we learn better when we enjoy something, and if we’re not feeling like we have to get a good grade.

What have you felt to be the difference between playing tennis and soccer and coaching them? 

Even when I was playing those sports, I would give my friends pointers and coach them in a way. It’s the same with how I started teaching. I remember being in algebra class and helping my peers because I felt that the teacher wasn’t explaining it well or that they were just saying the same explanation over and over again. In that way, teaching and coaching are the same. I enjoy coaching, maybe more than playing. I’m a better coach than player. 
But it’s also frustrating, watching from the sidelines and being like, “You just got to do this.”

How has performing theater influenced the way that you teach at Andover?

Teaching is theater. It is your acting. Especially with physics, I have all my props. I have my toys. I do a lot of demos. I like to do things with my hands. We have our lesson plan. It’s like a script in a sense, and then there’s a lot of space for improvisation within that. But there’s absolutely a connection. It’s [as] if you’re standing up in front of an audience and presenting something. 


What is one of your favorite astronomy fun facts?

Crazy things happen in the middle of a black hole. One of the processes of falling into a black hole is called Spaghettification. Literally, Spaghettification. It is where you basically spaghettify and elongate, because your feet are so much closer to the black hole that they accelerate faster than your head. And so you stretch. Kind of scary, but the term is very funny. Spaghettification.

Could you tell us about some of the most fascinating things you’ve seen in astronomy? 

Seeing Saturn in the telescope is pretty cool. It’s so amazing because when you look in the telescope, it looks like a picture of Saturn. It looks like [as] if you Google “Saturn.” It doesn’t look real. It’s really cool when you’re looking at it, and you’re like, “Wow, that is actually right there.” You can see the rings really well. It’s also fun seeing globular clusters, which are clusters of stars. There’s one, which is the globular cluster in Hercules, that we did a lot of looking at over the summer. It looks like this little puff ball… In college, I was able to take a picture of a galaxy, which was really fun. We used the telescope, and the way we take pictures is with a special camera called a CCD camera that is really just a bunch of numbers, and they assign light and color values to those numbers to make a picture.

What is something that you want students to know?

Andover does a really good job in some ways of not pushing you guys into specializing, but in other ways, there is this push still, especially from colleges, to do one thing. When I was graduating in high school, and everybody was applying to colleges, you’d ask them what [they] want to major in, and they’re like, “I don’t know, but not science,” or “I don’t know, but something in the sciences.” There weren’t a lot of people who were like, “I have no idea, I’m gonna try everything.” It’s really important that you experience different things. I don’t know if I did very well in high school physics, but here I am. You don’t have to be really good at something to be excited about it, and you do it.