Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 2)

We are back with another episode of the Late Start Show. We're resuming, we fixed the fire, and now we're back here with Mr. Harmon. I think the first question that we should probably ask is, how do you really think that you inspire curiosity and kind of innovation among the students in the context of the environment? And what's one kind of lesson that you want to put into every student? That's a dual question. What are the things that influence them most by being in the environment? Yeah, like how do you kind of want to inspire curiosity? Okay, my impression, my model, my model for learning is, it's not unique. I didn't invent the wheel. It is that humans learn best by experience, personal experience. You can't provide experience in every dimension, in every field that would be subjects in a school or a college, but you can get a lot of them. And my point of emphasizing the thing, the experiences in the outdoors is, we all live on this planet, and to me, it doesn't just seem commensurate with all the knowledge we have from so many sources that people in general are embracing this idea of sustainable living. That's a hard word to release. That's a hard word to release. That's a hard word to release. That's a hard word to release. To sustain something means to keep it going. So our backgrounds, you know, our extraction, our whole economy is based on making goods and services. So most of us conceive of making something like making automobiles in Detroit, and we talked about the experiences I had on ships that carried the materials to make the cars and to appreciate the scale. Captioning touted 30,000soon Armed гор abroad. istztantra.org Just think of all the materials that we're told. So the the scale of our extractions and the scales of our emissions, we discussed automobile exhaust, factory exhaust. This fire behind me is throwing back the carbon that was stored in that wood for hundreds of years. So. We have to understand that better. In the meantime, if you want to put everything on a curve, populations have been growing, extractions are going, markets grow. We cannot think of an economy that is healthy that does not grow. But someone posed the question. The earth has a finite surface. 70% of it is water. So 30% of it is a land mass that we have to sustain ourselves on. So every generation, it seems to be more and more extraction, more and more emissions. And we're right now at the crux, I think, of the light bulb coming on. We really have to do something about maybe even major lifestyle change. Schools like this have a growing opportunity and a mandate to prepare people to be curious. At least curious about these problems. A school like this can do a really great job at getting kids interested in these factors. Like, what's the carbon study here do? Well, at least you learn the tree names. And then you can apply some math, some basic math. You guys had trigonometry? Yeah. So trig, we use trig to determine a lot about the measurement of the tree height. We do value. We have diatom. Dr. Lau has a new meter that, during the summer, at least, using light penetration from the canopy overhead can tell how productive that tree is. So we have all these instrumentations, the stuff that makes this work, that gives us more insight into more accurate policies for managing things. Now we're at a different point where we've been so successful at it, it's almost in many ways too successful in terms of environment. It's impinging on the services we require in the environment. Water for drinking. So no one's saying we can't have oil. It's just we have to be able to measure the process that gives us that oil. What's the impact on the other services? It's like, you know, you need oxygen, and I do. But if you have a good fire going in a small room, you say, well, fire's good because it makes me warm. Yeah, but it takes away your oxygen. Well, let's have some windows open. You know what I'm getting at? It's called a balance. And a lot of it today is the extremism. You know, I want, you know, this thing to fly. Therefore, the other things are secondary. We can't do that anymore. It's just too many people are hurt by simplistic policy decisions that extract things that, in effect, threaten. Public health. I think that's a big thing that our school can do, is make you aware of the need for a healthy environment and what it takes to have that. And, Mr. Harmon, the word legend gets thrown a lot in our school community, but I can say that you qualify as a legend. So how does that feel to be a legend in the university school community? I don't like those labels. It's like, you know, a legend means somebody long. You know, Abraham Lincoln is a legend. You know, Albert Schweitzer is a legend. You know, Albert Einstein is a legend. His being on earth has influenced so much of the modern world. But, so, in high school, I don't like labels. I like my name to be called and be a friend. But a legend has some, I don't know what, I don't know. I don't know how to, I don't know how to process it. Yeah, I've lived a long time. I've been lucky to be with good people that makes those opportunities I took advantage of available. I have my home here, Grottis, because I get to spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I'm free of regular classroom responsibilities, which I would not want to do. I like to do. I get to develop lesson more lessons about Mapling and the forestry that's underneath it, the chemistry, the physics, same with the high fishery. And meanwhile, these two theaters directly relate to what we've been talking about. This building processes a sugar-rich fluid, every spring, that's taken from beautiful trees that have by, at least 70 years old before you can tap them. So in terms of. of the time scale that takes to get a resource to make something like this. So you need not only trays to get in our property, the average growth rate of maples to get to be 12 inches, which is the beginning of tapping. That's when you tap them, about 12 inches. That's 70 years. So you go out in the forest, there's some seedlings coming up and you want to promote those. You'll never see them again, you know what I mean? Because you won't live that long. We have some maples here that are 300 years old. They were here. We have some oaks that were here before the constitution was developed. And we have, maybe you've seen my case of exhibit case up in where my desk. Those, some of those artifacts are from here. There were people here for thousands of years. And another one is this legend here. I have, when we built this fireplace, we put a story of the geology of the campus here. You can have a whole class on the hearth and the chimney. We have the oldest rock that's available to build. It's a CA on the campus, which exhumed by the glaciers. That's way before glaciers. And then up through the geological times, then the glacier comes, smears this place with clay and different rocks from Canada. You see these big boulders? Sitting around here? Where do you think they came from? You know, they weren't trucked in here. So nobody bought them. A rock the size of a Volkswagen, you know, embedded in an ice that was formed in Labrador. And slowly, by as glaciers creep, like pouring maple syrup on pancakes, like the syrup goes out. The ice would come down, picking up loose rock wherever it passed. So the story of everything from here to Labrador, is in the geology at the surface. So those stories are so powerful. I mean, these things happen, which really stretches your imagination that as soon as, or as close as 20,000 years ago, that's nothing in geology, right? This place was under a half mile of ice. A half mile, maybe more. Up in Greenland today, the center of the ice is three miles. The cap to bedrock, which is 2,000 feet below sea level because of the weight of the ice, is that many thousand years. And this all affects us here. This campus surface is the gift of the glacier. The river down there, the Chagrin, that valley was widened and deepened for that river that followed. And so that's, those things, that gets into drama. You know? History, which is the study of natural processes. It should be dramatic to realize that we were predisposed to make things and the raw materials to do that were spread over the earth by a whole bunch of forces, volcanoes, ice ages. And not to appreciate that, I think, is really a missing part of your education in this day and age because it's so much of these beautiful stories available. Sr. You know, a lot of people also with that idea of legend and also, with that word, obviously, we just talked about a lot of people also asked and maybe seen that one-way legends are honored in our communities by being given a house, right? We see with actually the man who hired you, Roland McKinley, all those years ago, he was given a house, right? Right. Sr. And we have a lot of the many honored people in our community given houses. Mr. Yeah, well. What would it mean to you having your own house? What do you kind of feel about that idea? Well, Outdoor Projects is my house. I mean, that's my flag. It says Outdoor Projects, not Terry Harmon on a flag out in the parking lot. This is the flag right here where you do things. Honor it by being inquired. Now, people will come in here, you know, when we're cooking. The number that don't amazes me. They're out there practicing lacrosse during that period. And I've seen buses come in, guys jump out with all their tools. And then it's over and then they go. And the steam is pouring out and the wind is blowing that beautiful aroma of sugar. And so few come in. That amazes me. But they take time for that, but they can't find this as kind of a fun. This would be a great place. You know, like they have, you know, this thing called Apres Ski. Do you ever hear of that? After ski. They have these ski resorts have after ski parties, you know, or a pub that's going and everybody goes and they celebrate the day on the slopes. So here, this would be Apres lacrosse practice. And plenty of room here. We have fire going, benches. It's a way to gather again. You know. Low key. Something's going on. Somebody has to be in here all the time. Serious on watch while everybody's having fun out here. And that energizes the guys here to spend hours when we have our system full of SAP. We will not start a fire in that big machine until we have that outside tank, which is 1,200 gallons. And plus seem to these white tanks that are out in the woods. We store it because the beauty. The beauty of of this project is that you can't control most of it. So many things in our society, including this school, is all program. It's outlined for the future. You know exactly what's going to happen on a given date. We don't know this. We could be we have boom or bust. We could have a great year or a lousy year. What does this connect to? Last summer was a drought. What does a drought do? There's very little soil water left. Even before this. Cold came. We didn't get quite enough rain. So what is maple sap made with its 90% water or more than 90% so the tree last summer? What we're going to get this year is last summer's production of sugar excess. So with spring comes, why are the trees flowing when they do? They're not doing it to make sugar for us. They're doing it to feed the buds. What are the buds? The the seed, the buds for the leaves. So the leaves leaf out after that excess, excess energy is stored in the roots. So what do you know the difference? You have chemistry between sugar and starch. A starch molecule is simply a sucrose molecule with a water removed and it will form a chain bond. So our sugars are usually six carbon and then we have five carbon sugars and so anything a carbohydrate. Is made from these sugars that are changed as we cook. So the color of the sap, you'll notice the syrup. Generally the sap we get is 2% sugar. That's that. That means it's 98% water and minerals. There's minerals in it too, but it's soil water now picking up sugar in the roots now and then shooting it up as much as 80 feet in tiny microtubules. 80 feet in tiny microtubules. 80 feet in tiny microtubules. 80 feet in tiny microtubules. How do you get the pressure to do that? But you know, you guys have studied this thing, osmotic pressure. If you put salt next to a membrane, take a cup of water and divide it with a plastic membrane and you have salt water on one side and fresh water on the other. You come the next morning and the whole thing is equal salinity, both sides. What's happened? Well, water has been drawn into the salt. You're part of the divide, and that's called osmotic pressure. Osmotic pressure is caused by a differential between the salt content, mineral content of one area of a solution and the other. So pure distilled water would have great osmotic pressure to go into the salt solution to dilute it. So in the morning it's all the same. So the tree is using that principle. With starch and sugar, sugar is soluble like salt. It's very soft. You do this at home. You have go, go to your mom's starch, cornstarch. Okay, use it in baking and and take a teaspoon, put it in a glass of water, then get a teaspoon of sugar, white sugar, put it in the other. And first of all, notice where it dissolves. Will one where they both dissolve? Will one where they both dissolve? Similarly, or will one not mix? So just leave it. Go back in the morning and what do you see? Well, you'll see that the sugar is completely invisible. It's gone into the solution, but the starch still floating. All I have to do is have an enzyme that has one water molecule to each starch molecule becomes a sugar molecule. Bingo goes up. So the trees have evolved over time. Starch cells in the roots. So our sugar for next spring is in all the roots of these sugar trees, and it's stored there. You store it as starch because it won't dissolve even though it's surrounded by water. Some spring and still this is kind of a magic. When does the tree recognize it's time to run sap? It's when this ice comes out of the ground. Now, some message is given. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. Some people think there's a signal from the buds because that's what they're looking for. energy to make the bud open and give a leaf so they can make more sugar yeah cool so we tap into the excess of the sugar that is being carried up at the time of the year it's feeding the buds in those trees so you may know that we have to quit we're always looking out at the buds as the buds get bigger on the ends we we know we're finished we're just about finished and because the the tree needs that to leaf out to make more sugar well you know Native Americans figured this a long time ago but anyway we put the chemical formulas on it so that's a lot of chemistry and we measure it here by density with hydrometers we can measure it with experiments with starch comparing starch with sugar sugar solutions and we understand the forces that push it up so if you take that osmotic pressure in a big tube it doesn't go too high but you take it in a microtubule which is like two like 400 microns across it's like a wick you know what a wick is yeah it draws fluids yes you could call adhesion you must have studied that adhesion and cohesion a little bit yeah so the tree is a master of cohesion and Screen cheating we wanted to be careful if you're in an osmotic pressure control if a tree doesn't have the right size we don't take it it's like it's like you give blood you ever give bloody I haven't given wood okay I haven't but you know once when you're you could do it now but they give take a pint that's fine but if they left you going with this going you die same with the tree we take just of physics principles chemistry principles okay so these two anchor points show me at least how much you can influence people here with using it as a general experience with with mapling or something to do with fisheries the fisheries thing in is in addition to the hatchery dynamics has a has a goal for a biology along with this you know preoccupation with environmental integrity right and sustainability we're losing animals like like like crazy like losing a coat why because we everywhere we go we have a big footprint we clear forests for farming we use landscapes for fertilizers which often drain in the rivers and cause more algae blue roll da da da it goes on and on in other words man is a major factor through his land management to affect all these environments so one of the the the most the most delicate or high demanding environment animals here in the chagrin Valley was the brook trout that's the fish that's in the aquarium that isn't there just for because they're pretty we look to sustaining them because they're disappearing and there are measurably disappearing you know mr. Herman you've been quoted saying that you love what you do and that you would have been us for more than 50 years if you didn't love it still many people your age to not do all the things that you do on the daily um and you know mr. Herman almost or 55th year at the school right what is your why what is your why We ask this question to a lot of our interviewers, but why do you take the time every day to make sure everybody's day is just a little bit brighter and to make the future just a little bit better? Well, you know, life is a complex mixture of selfishness and altruism. I love the subjects that these resources provide, and you want other people to get their good out of it. Nobody's going to get the same message from anything. Anybody in any course in this school will not, despite the fact they take standard tests, they will get good results. They have completely different expertise in things. The ones that excel find something unique about it, like I did. This once-in-a-lifetime, we get a couple of guys, like Dominic Giuliana. He's a guy that graduated a couple of years ago. He's now at Pennsylvania. He is in chemistry. He took to equipment. He works here. As a student, he was so trusted with equipment, they gave him a job. You know, he needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it. He needed it.

He just flourished in the outdoor things, and a lot of curiosity. So everybody's going to get their own experience. Exposed to the same medium, they're going to get a completely different experience. You don't want to tell people, oh this is what you should know. No, this is what you should see, and come up with your own opinion that makes sense to fitting into a culture that has to adapt, and also to having personal fulfillment. So for me, being here has been, and being with guys like you, it's a social thing. You know, when I'm over there in that house, that's not, you know, what do I, I'll read and stuff. But you need, you have to be, especially the older you get, you don't want to get farmed out to a corner, and be isolated, be redundant or obsolete. So you have to learn all your life, or you're not gonna click in. I have a lot of built-in resistance to modern technology. It doesn't make sense to spend so much time for me on trying to find out these abbreviated lessons on Google and stuff, where I'd much rather go into a book that goes deeper, or somehow just holding a book feels better. And that, of course, is from conditioning. You know, I like books better than the phone. I like to read a bigger screen, plus your eyes need, you know, better communication with print. So, you know, for me to enter this world, for me to try to do what you do would be just ridiculous. I could, I would not fit to it. I wouldn't have the patience, to spend the time that you did to make this work. But out there, I loved what I did, so I learned how trees work a little bit better. But I have to keep reading on the new stuff, because even that stuff, those concepts are challenged now. Things constantly change. You know that, you've always said, the one thing that's constant is change, and you have to adapt, or you get left alone, and... Physical and mental ways, and that's not good. So, the reason for doing this is because I get satisfaction of seeing a few people like Charlie Bates. He's really at the top of the profession that I'm interested in, the salmon. And it's an important issue now, because people need food. Fish are the last wild resource in food left on Earth. Everything else is cultured. All our other meat products are made by farming. So they're farming fish now, too, and that makes sense. It gives us more. But Charlie is an example of a guy who, up until his senior year, didn't show much interest in the outdoors. And then suddenly, he was a swimmer. He was really a star swimmer here, Charlie Bates. Have you heard of him? I think he's on the board. I have heard of him, yeah. Yeah, he's a really great swimmer. And he went swimming in college, too. And so now he's swimming in the business of fish. Swimming sounds like he's a natural for that business. But he's a pathologist. He's got a veterinarian degree from Ohio State. He went to college for four years. Got two years in a vet school. And now he's got this job, which is a lot of microscope work, parasites and things. What happens when you culture animals in close quarters? Anything, cows, cattle, fish. They're prone for, in proximity, they're easy to exchange diseases and parasites. So he's gotta be on top of that. Otherwise, just last year in Norway, big investment in Atlantic salmon production for food. They got an infection and it ran away and it just destroyed the industry up there. So that's a payoff. If I get one of him, one of Dominic Giuliani, another guy we have, he's a professor of forestry, I think, at the University of New Hampshire. You know what he loved to do? He loved to find the biggest tree on the campus, the oldest tree. Then he had a coring device that could age the average rate of growth of the tree. And he did a lot of research. He did a lot of research. He made a little paper on that. That was his paper, the oldest trees of the campus. Stuff like that, natural history. Had no practical outcome. It's just cool to know a tree was here before the revolution, you know? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so in poetry, anybody in writing, there's so many things that go back. There were so many poets in England and elsewhere who went to the forest theme for poetry or philosophy. There were so many poets in England and elsewhere who went to the forest theme for poetry or philosophy. They've been with us a long time. We are a creature of the forest. And the more we go urbanized, the more we get removed from those influences, the more foreign things seem. So we're much more prone to buy into convenient explanations for everything and more energy use, you know? So we have a big role here. It's not to tell people what to do with their lives. It's to make them look so that they can figure out what to do. It's to make them look so that they can figure out what to do. It's to make them look so that they can figure out what to do. It's to make them look so that they can figure out what to do. It's to make them look so that they can figure out what to do. Much more fulfilling. And Mr. Harmon, you've taught so many lessons in the classroom, out of the classroom. And through those, I think kids have definitely learned a lot of life lessons from you. But if you could, what do you think is the most important life lesson that you could teach kids like me and Charlie? You know, I see your educational careers as having like, you know, the three stages. Primary, is you're just learning the basic skills of communication with your family and others. You have an enormous pressure for physical growth and balance and so that's the, so important for sports at the right timing and the right kind of sports to develop the body. In the meantime, you know, you can't separate the learning of the mind or the body. They go together, you know. If you have good physical health, you're going to have good mental health too. So, the main thing is to embrace your surroundings,

wherever they are, and bring to bear what you personally have tried to learn to improve yourself and the ones around you. We're always admonished about the shallow rewards for just pursuing money. Going to a school that's going to give you a lot of assets, so you can triumph in the stock market or something. There's a lot of that out and at your age, I think it balloons into a big attraction. America seems to be on fire with, you know, growing portfolios and then you're looking for an opening in your own head and body to find something that really, you are physically and mentally capable of, you know, embracing and improving for both yourself and others. And, you know, that one thing, if you cannot be true to yourself, you cannot be true to everybody, anybody else. So, you know, at your age, I know that you're bombarded with do this, do this, and this will pay off big. And that's part of the world's influence. You've got to, out of all those cherries, you've got to pick the one that makes sense to you. Or later on, it will not fulfill you. So, and don't, just don't make, you know, money and success. The success and money comes when you have that passion that really personally, you know, fits your personality and your talents. So if you go off and do something just because, you know, follow this, it'll make you a lot of money. No.

But that's old philosophy anyway. You know, to thy own self be true. You've worked with the National Park Service in countless, cleveland.com articles, featured on WKYC, at so many other science journals, papers. Mr. Herman, your legacy precedes you, right? It's just, it's just incredibly impressive. But still, at the end of this great episode, my only question is when the day is done and you're kind of finally ready to turn off the lights of the hatchery for the last time, what is the legacy and memory that you want to leave? I want these places to continue offering the rewards I've experienced. And other students have experienced through the time that they've operated here. I don't want this to turn into a dance hall or something. And it can, unless we have a conscious effort to not highlight, you know, legacy stuff, but what this can do for the future. It's beginning with John Kaczynski's edition of the solar panels. We have the conviction that, that would make this program more attractive to kids who are techies, who like technology. And they are. This is fantastic. These little panels have increased production in some of the yards here where we use it. You know what it does? It runs a little vacuum pump. Just about three pounds vacuum. That's very little. Since we haven't discussed how the physics of the sap collection goes, but it's basically, if you look at the tubules, there's one hanging over there. They're only 3 16th inch of a diameter. Before we used to use big pipes. And in that sense, the atmosphere that the sap is running out to in the wild atmosphere was equal in pressure to the inside. So when somebody like you or you who would be in a program, maybe not here, but in another school figured out that if you really narrow the pipe, you know, the people are saying, well, you make the pipe smaller, you're not going to get as much sap. Wrong. You make the pipe smaller up to this one, 3 16th of an inch. Once it fills, even on a moderate slope, the mass of sap in that line, which could be 300 feet, 400 feet, the mass of it, the weight at the other end, delivery end, begins to pull. And as it pulls, since the line system, the taps are sealed, they're not exposed to the atmosphere. It puts vacuum on the holes in the tree. So the tree is both fighting atmospheric pressure to let sap out. When you wound the tree with a drill hole, it'll come out because there's all that osmotic pressure we talked about in the roots, but also with these tubes hanging down and then running down, maybe vertically a 60 foot drop. Man, so we have to watch that we don't over, you know, it's like giving blood again. And now the guy's staying on the blood needle too long. He's going to be in trouble. But we found that this 360 inch line is more work to set up. But then when it's up, it works for you. The old way you realize was buckets. And these buckets were hung from numerous trees, an enormous amount of effort, physical effort. And that was good for a school because kids need physical work. You want work? We've just changed the effort into more mechanical than physical. But it's got to change again in the future. I don't know what's going to happen. We've run into several things because the program has a meeting every January with what's called the Maple Association. There's a, you know, every industrial association has meetings and they talk about the latest technology. So that's where we learned to do this. We take kids in the program. It's an all day session on a Saturday out, usually at Middlefield or where the, a lot of Amish people love this industry. As you know, they're the big producers in Geauga County are the Amish people. Some of their messages come through at these meetings as well as university professors, Ohio State, Cornell, University of Vermont have speakers that come to these meetings. And we learn all kinds of things like sanitation and the sugar, look at this. As a food producer of open building floors, mice running around, how can we do this without being a big problem? Well, the product is entirely boiled for hours. So it's totally sterile. The bottles are kept clean and closed and until they're filled. And then that sterility is still in the bottle. So public health people understand this is very safe. Most sugar houses have mud floors. Yeah. So it's a really primitive and who the public loves these things. They go out to these sugar camps, you know, to see people boiling the sap. We have one right here. It is a romantic kind of connection to the past. So we tie together, you know, modern goals with the history of that activity with other goals. And this is a paramount activity for tying old activity to new materials like the understanding the sap flow so we can get a pump on it, knowing when to quit the pump.

This also goes off to business like labels. So if this doesn't, your question was, do you want to legacy this thing? Yeah, I would like. It has a big learning curve. You can't do it in one year. You need to go through the heartbreak of things here too, like where you don't get, it's the same layout of work. The weather's like this, it's cold. Maybe in the spring, it's all wet. It's raining on wet snow. It's muddy. And you find out that it's part of the romance of the activity, you know, instead of, oh, it's too cold. I don't want to go outside. You have to, if you're doing it. Then it's over, it comes over. Now, the other discipline is the big one, cleaning. All of this stuff needs cleaning. You know, a lot of people like to go to the party, but nobody wants to do the dishes. And that's true with everything. A lot of things here are, you guys will function and stuff and then they leave the dishes for somebody else. I know that, you do too. We have so many activities that require food, we have interaction with kitchen and stuff. And it's hard to have people that are behind an activity to really go the whole length. You know, the door closes and everything's clean inside. But here, what happens? The season's over, big season, baseball's on, you know, goodbye. Well, you clean it up. Okay. So a lot of us will do the grunting. We're not gonna clean the kitchen. We're not gonna clean the kitchen. We're not gonna clean the kitchen. We're not gonna do the grunt work just to have it because of the rewards you get. Because if you don't have it, you have nothing. You know, it's just a school in an ice forest with a pond. The canoeing is another thing we've done with outdoor projects. You know, the canoe project. That for me was started for the lower school. You know, the third grade history of Native Americans. So you can allude to cultural things, social things. While you're doing a physical thing. And the canoe to me was paramount for me to learn the skills to build a really functioning, pretty cool boat. Have you seen them? Yeah, I have. Have you seen them? Oh, yeah, yeah. They're sewn together. There's no metal fasteners or glue. And I learned that both in books, the history books of this, and then the people up where I got the bark. They're the people that gave us the canoe. The place I go to get the tree, the bark is a community called Bear Island Algonquin people. It's a village of about, oh, 28 or 30 families. And they run a store. And it's out in a big lake. And they control a big forest where I can get the materials every time I want to build a boat. So the idea was to take guys from this level, you, your level on a summer. It has to be, though, in May or June, early June, because you need the sap in the tree to get the bark, or it won't come off. And you go up, and we camp at night, and we pick our trees, we cut them down. The Algonquin people get the wood. We take the bark off, we roll it up. We go get a cedar tree, and we buy these. We buy these. So I pay this company up there, the First Nations Algonquin Lumber Company. And I buy two trees. The guy says, you want these birch trees? Okay, and that. And my boat, and my, and one night in his house, $450. It's a giveaway. So, but I, we get to cut the tree with them. So far, I'm the only one that have gone. This big tree has felled, the bark has taken off, and that's a real, a fire has to be going. You have boiling water. You pour hot water on the stem. The bark starts to peel away. That was to be part of the experience of the canoe, to get the materials, then get them back to school here, and then build it. And the guys would have the experience of where it came from. As it was, I did that. I brought it back. So you come, and there's this plywood platform with stakes sticking in it. I don't know if you remember that, when that last one I built. It was down there where my desk is. I thought building there, a lot more kids would come and were curious. I was amazed at how few kids were curious about what it was. You know, there was a mess there. I had bark, shavings all over the floor. We were on a canvas that I laid down. And a few people, like Dom, came. He wanted to learn how to sew, because the boat was sewn together, you know. So, I understand the, the, The, I mean, I say, you'd say, are you offended by not having a lot of people jump in on building a birch bark canoe? No, it was a historic thing that attracted me and it paid off with the little kids. So we take them to Camp Whitewood and that was where the teacher and another, some other adults were controlling the canoe and three little kids, these boats are 17 feet, so you could get three kids in there and they tell us what they know about Indians, North American Indians. So it fit into a social program, which the third grade has these theme-based curriculum. And we had the fun of building the boats. I'm sorry, we can't leave them down on the dock like these destruction-less Kevlar boats. You could drop those from an airplane and they, but the birch canoe is tough, but it's delicate in some ways. So if I left it there, people who would use it like they use the other ones would destroy it because you'd have to know how to use it. It's like a violin, you know, it sounds great if somebody knows how to play it, but it sounds awful if somebody just, you know. Well, that's enough. I mean, I don't know what, that legacy is, please use the hatchery would be up to, let me list the, what do you find? Plankton. Seasonal changes with water. So that thing is running water. You saw it into the building constantly. There's a way to put a sock net in the flume so that every day you can get a sample of what is growing in the lake, suspended life, plankton, protozoa. So that fits into biology. And if they had a unit and instead of just DNA all the time on plankton, it's just a different topic. Crustacea, you go through the phylums. What kind of animals have miniaturized through evolution and are constantly coming out of the lake and then plot them. Plot them by date and season. And you learn a lot about it. You probably know about algae problems on the Great Lakes. Do you know about it? Oh, yeah. There's a group of algae known as blue-green, it's called cyanobacteria. Some of them, not all of them, some species produce toxins. They're neurotoxins. And over the years, the west end of Lake Erie between Toledo and Indiana, that area is so rich soil. And yet the people, the farmers still fertilize heavily. So extra phosphorus filters into the Maumee River, which goes right by Toledo. And then where does it go? Right into Lake Erie. So every year now you see the satellite picture of Lake Erie is blue. And then you see it on the west end. It's blue-green. And some of that stuff has been so pervasive that it actually has closed beaches. So that knowledge about what problems can happen, again, from human behavior causing these accelerated changes. You get a background here on dealing with that kind of creature, algae. What's an algae? You know, it's usually a one-celled plant, right? And then there's crustacea. And then of course the fish through seasons. So I would like teachers to embrace the place and to have them develop their own labs for it. So I will make available, the seasonal resource defined. You know, cold water now, spring, warming water with sediment. So you get into physical geology with sediments. Then you have biology with the plankton. So your imagination is the limit. The water's coming in all the time. So you get real-time data on changes. If, in one sense, you could kind of encapsulate everything you've done the last 55 years and what U.S. has meant to you in the last 55 years, what would you say? You mean the keystone of what I have? Yeah, just, I mean. Really, the message is,

ideal. Combine science topics in line courses with some kind of experience in the outdoors on this campus or nearby. There are tons of opportunities. So the Grin River is near the trout stream that we had up in Sulphur Springs and South Street Grin Reservation. The importance, again, I told you long ago, I think my model for education is more, you know, they talk it hands-on. Where you personally experience setting up an experiment, or an observation. And with all the toys we have now, all the equipment, there's so many things like, talk to Dr. Lau about all the latest forestry equipment. Or these camera sets in the woods for wildlife, it's photographs. So my message would be, maximize personal experience in the topics that you spend so much time in books on. Which are absolutely necessary, valid, good, but they're somebody else's experience. They're somebody else's data. So I don't know your experience, but I can remember, you know, when I was teaching in the classroom, the kinds of data that we dealt with. A lot of it was outdoors. We did soil analysis and things like that that they don't do anymore. I mean, there's only so much time in a day, and there's only days in a semester. So I understand, too, the standardized testing thing, which we never had. And that's a pressure that is overwhelming. And that probably explains a lot of the gaps in our using the outdoors, and why fewer kids have time. That's right. Someone had said, well, you're so smart. No, it has nothing to do with intelligence. It simply has to do with age, and the privilege of experiencing a lot of different things. From sailoring on the Great Lakes in the Edmund Fitzgerald waters, to, you know what I mean by that? Oh, yeah. What was the Edmund Fitzgerald? Oh, no, I don't know. It was a ship. It was a ship that sank. It's the last freighter. No, it is the second last freighter that sank on the Great Lakes because of storms. These boats are huge, but they're fragile in terms of the scale of the ocean. That experience on into Labrador, and the studying of the river that became the electric source for such as much of this, Cleveland Museum, then here, and then you guys. So if it weren't for you guys to be interested in any of these things, then a teacher has no position there. Well, yeah, thank you so much. Well, thank you so much. Adam, we always thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm gonna help you. It's getting dark now. That's another curse of this time of year, no daylight. But thank you so much for this whole thing, and to our viewers, thank you so much for listening in, and we hope you have a good holiday.