Transcript: Mr. Harmon Holiday Special (Part 2)

We are back with another episode of 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 like lesson that you want to put into every student? That's a dual question. What are the things that influence the 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. be subjects in a school or a college, but you can get a lot of them.

And my point of emphasizing 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 really justify. 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 to make the cars and to appreciate the scale of extraction that our ship carried 8,000 tons of iron ore on one trip. And then trip after trip for 50 years that thing sailed. Just think of all the materials that were told.

So the scale of our extractions and the scales of our emissions, we discussed automobile exhaust, factory exhaust. throwing back the carbon that was stored in that wood for hundreds of years. So we have to understand that better. At 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 landmass 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 life changes, lifestyle changes. Schools like this have a growing opportunity and a mandate to prepare people to be curious about, 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 learn some, you can apply some math, some basic math. You guys had trigonometry? - Yeah. - Yeah, so trig, we use trig to determine a lot about the measurement tree height, we do value. 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 a more accurate policies for managing things. But now we're at a different point where we've been successful at it, it's almost in many ways too successful in terms of environment. It's impinging on the services we require in 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. going in a small room, you say, well, fire's good 'cause it makes me warm.

Yeah, but it takes away your oxygen. Well, let's have some windows open. You know what I've got? It's called a balance.

And a lot of the today is the extremism. I want 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 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. A legend means somebody long, Abraham Lincoln is a legend. Albert Schweitzer's a legend. Albert Einstein's a legend.

His being on earth has influenced so much of the modern world. So in high school, I don't like labels. and me to be a friend, but a legend has some, 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, gratis, because I get to spend a lot of time in the outdoors. I'm free of regular classroom responsibilities, which I would not want today. I'd like to develop more lessons about mapling and the forestry that's underneath it, the chemistry, the physics, same with the fishery. And meanwhile, these two theaters directly relate to what we've been talking about.

This building processes a sugar-rich fluid spring that's taken from beautiful trees that by at least are 70 years old before you can tap them. So in terms 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. You go out in the forest, there's some seedlings coming up and you want to promote those. You'll never see them again 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, exhibit case up on my desk. 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 see on the campus 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? They weren't trucked in here. Nobody bought them. A rock the size of a Volkswagen embedded in ice that was formed in Labrador.

And slowly, as glaciers creep, like pouring maple syrup on pancakes, the syrup goes out, I'm down picking up loose rock wherever it pants. 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 those things, that gets into drama.

You know, natural 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. You know, a lot of people also with that idea of legend and also with that word that obviously we just talked about, a lot of people also asked and maybe seen that one-way legends are kind of honored in our communities by being given a house, right?

We see with actually the men who hired you, Roland McKinley, all those years ago, he was given a house, right? And we have a lot of the many honored people in our community given houses. 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 a parking lot. This is the flag right here where you do things.

Honor it by being inquired. 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. 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 this thing called Opry Ski.

Do you ever hear of that? - No. - After ski, they have these ski resorts, they 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 Opry La Crosse. practice. And there's 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 our fire in that big machine until we have that outside tank, which is 1,200 200 gallons, plus even these white tanks that are out in the woods, we store it. Because the beauty of this project is that you can't control most of it. So many things in our society, including this school, it's all programmed. It's outlined for the future.

You know exactly what's gonna happen on a given day. We don't know this. We could 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? It's 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 when spring comes, why are the trees flowing when they do? of sugar for us, they're doing it to feed the buds. What are the buds? The seed buds, the buds for the leaves. So the leaves leaf out.

After that, 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'll form a chain bond.

So our sugars are, Usually six carbon, and then we have five carbon sugars. 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 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. 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, and the whole thing is equal salinity, both sides. What's happened? Well, water has been drawn into the saltier part of the divide. And that's called osmotic pressure.

The osmotic pressure is caused by a differential between the salt, mineral content of one area of a solution and the other. So pure distilled water 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 to your mom's starch, corn starch.

Okay, you use it in baking. And take a teaspoon, put it in a glass of water. sugar, white sugar, put it in the other. And first of all, notice where it dissolves. Will one, will 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's completely invisible.

It's gone into the solution. But the starch's still floating. All I have to do is have an enzyme It adds one water molecule to each starch molecule, becomes a sugar molecule, bingaloo 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? ice comes out of the ground. Now, some message is given, some people think there's a signal from the buds, 'cause that's what the sap is running for, to feed the buds to make the leaves.

It takes energy to make the bud open and give a leaf so that it 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. 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 know we're finished.

We're just about finished. And 'cause 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 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 400 microns across. It's like a wick.

You know what a wick is? - Yeah. - It draws fluids. called adhesion, you must have studied that, adhesion and cohesion. - A little bit. - Yeah, so the tree is a master of cohesion and osmotic pressure control. - Wow. - If a tree doesn't have the right size, we don't take it. It's like, you give blood, you ever give blood? - I haven't given blood, okay. - I haven't, no. - Well, you could do it now, but take a pint, that's fine. this going, you die. Same with the tree. We take just enough sap, one tap per tree is fine.

Okay, the hatchery is the same thing. A lot of physics principles, chemistry principles. Okay, so these two anchor points show me, at least, how much you can influence people here using it as a general experience with mapling, or something to do with fisheries. The fisheries thing, in addition to the hatchery dynamics, has a goal for biology.

Along with this preoccupation with environmental integrity and sustainability, we're losing animals like crazy, like losing a coat. Why? Because 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. 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 most delicate or high demanding environment animals here Grand Valley was the brook trout.

That's the fish that's in the aquarium. That isn't there just because they're pretty. We look to sustaining them because they're disappearing. And they're measurably disappearing.

You know, Mr. Harmon, you've been quoted saying that you love what you do and that you wouldn't have been in the U.S. for more than 50 years if you didn't love it. Still, many people your age do not do all the things that you do on the daily. No.

And, you know, Mr. Harmon, almost your 55th year at this school, right? 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. that these resources provide. And you want other people to get their good out of it. Nobody's gonna 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 completely different expertise in things.

The ones that excel find something unique about it, like I did. we get a couple of guys, like Dominic Giuliana. He's the 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. He needed to work.

He just flourished in the outdoor things. And a lot of curiosity. Everybody's gonna get their own experience. Exposed to the same medium, they're gonna get 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 be fitting into a culture that has to adapt and also to having personal fulfillment. So for me, being here, 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, you're not going to 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. your screen, plus your eyes need better communication with print. So for me to enter this world, for me to try to do what you do would be just ridiculous. 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 in physical and mental ways, and that's not good. So the reason for doing this is because I get satisfaction 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, cattle, all our other meats products are made by farmed. So they're farming fish now too, and that makes sense, it gives us more. 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 got to 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 little paper on that, that was his paper, the oldest trees of the campus, stuff like that, natural history. He had no practical outcome. 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.

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 those influences, the more foreign things seem. So we're much more prone to buy into convenient explanations for everything and more energy use.

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 with their lives. Much more fulfilling.

And Mr. Hartman, you've taught so many lessons in the classroom, out of the class. 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 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 with the body. They go together, you know. but 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 were 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 growing portfolios. opening in your own head and body to find something that really you are physically and mentally capable of embracing and improving for both yourself and others.

And that one thing, if you cannot be true to yourself, you cannot be true to everybody, anybody else. So at your age, I know that you're bombarded with do this, do this, and this will pay off big. 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 their own self be true. You've worked with the National Park Service and countlessclevan.com articles featured on WKYC at so many other science journals, papers.

Mr. Harmon, your legacy precedes you, right? 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 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. It runs a little vacuum pump.

It's just about three pounds of vacuum. That's very little. Since we haven't discussed how the physics of the sap collection goes, but it's basically tubules. There's one hanging over there.

They're only 3/16 inch of a diameter. Before we used to use big pipes. And in that sense, the atmosphere that the sap is running out to 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, 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 the ionic 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 other guys staying on the blood needle too long, he's gonna be in trouble. But we found that this 360 inch line is more work to set up, but then when it's up, 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 gotta change again in the future. I don't know what's gonna happen.

We've run into several things The program has a meeting every January with what's called the Maple Association. Every industrial association has meetings, and they talk about the latest technology. So that's where we learn to do this. We take kids in the program.

It's an all-day session on a Saturday out usually at Middlefield, where a lot of Amish people love this industry, as you know. They're the big producers in geography. 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. Come and look at this.

As a food producer, open building, floors, mice running around. How can we do this without being a big problem? The product is entirely boiled for hours. So it's totally sterile.

The bottles are kept clean and closed 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. So it's a really primitive, and the public loves these things.

They go out to these sugar camps oiling the sap, we have one right here. It is a romantic kind of connection to the past. So we tie together modern goals with the history of that activity with other goals. 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 raining on wet snow. It's muddy.

And you find out that it's part of the romance of the activity. Instead of, oh, it's too cold. I don't wanna 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.

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 and interaction with kitchen and stuff. And it's hard to have people that are behind an activity to really go the whole length. inside, but here, what happens? The season's over, baseball's on, goodbye. Well, you clean it up, okay.

So a lot of us will do the grunt work just to have it because of the rewards you get. Because if you don't have it, you have nothing. It's just a school in a nice forest with a pot. The canoeing is another thing we've done with outdoor projects, the canoe project.

That for me was started for the lower school, 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. on 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, 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 we'd camp at night and we'd pick our trees. We'd 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, Okay, and that, and my boat, and one night in his house, $450 to give away. But we get to cut the tree with them.

So far, I'm the only one that's gone. This big tree is felled, the bark is 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 one, that last one I built. It was down there where my desk is.

And I thought building there, a lot more kids would come and were curious. I'm 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, 'cause the boat was sewn together. So I understand the, I say, are you offended by not having a lot of people jump in on building a birch bark canoe?

No. 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 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. 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 sounds great if somebody knows how to play it, but it sounds awful if somebody just .

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, 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? Plot them by date and season. You learn a lot about it.

You probably know about algae problems on the Great Lakes. Do you know about it? 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. over the years, the west end of Lake Erie between Toledo and Indiana, that area is so rich soil. And yet 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 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? usually a one-celled plant, right? And then there's crustacea, and of course the fish through seasons.

So I would like teachers to embrace the place and to 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 like 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 set? - Oh, you mean when 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.

Susie Grin River is near the trout stream that we had up in Sulphur Springs and South Susie Grin Reservation. The importance, again, I told you long ago, I think my model for education is more, you know, they call 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, good, but there's somebody else's experience. There's 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 and 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 so many days in a semester. So I understand too, 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 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. 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. I always thank you for sharing your experiences. I'm going to help you this dark now. That's another curse. 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 and we hope you have a good holidays