I've always had a mild interest in astronomy, but it never really clicked until I entered college. When I was in 4th grade, I pretended I was from Mercury, and I had been to a few star gazing events in my childhood, but that was pretty much it. When choosing what science to take to fufill my general education requirements last year, I had to choose between biology and astronomy. It was a pretty easy choice, since I had biology two years prior and hated it. I ended up having a fairly laid back instructor for my first astronomy class, and her love of the subject ended up rubbing off on me, as I ended up taking her 102 class the following semester, and am currently taking another astronomy class at a different campus. In that first year, we learned all about our solar system and what lies beyond. Our professor encouraged creativity and alternative learning methods, so quite a few of our classes involved debates, games, experiments (in one class we even got to make homemade comet), and random clips from Star Trek.

Although having a passionate, creative professor is a great way to make astronomy more interesting and enjoyable, the probablility of finding a similar senario may be slim (at least on the college level). However, that doesn't mean there aren't ways to make astronomy fun to learn. You can try exploring different websites for space related games and experiments (such as the previously mentioned comet recipe), attend local star and planet gazing events, read the last couple of chapters in an astronomy textbook (whenever I get bored learning about light spectrums, this always works for me, particularly chapters about black holes, extraterrestrial life, and end of the universe theories), or put it into an art form, such as stories, poetry and drawings. Our semester project for that class inspired me to write a short sci-fi story involving alternate solar systems and wormholes. Similarly, each exam had a section where you could write a commercial or story related to the material, and these questions inspired a small collection of pseudo educational shorts which I called Timmy and the Professor (I put the original in another hub). If you have any desire to learn astornomy, or if you want something to make the material more enjoyable, these ideas may help. If not, you can always doodle or check the backs of your eyelids till the class ends.