Transcript: Mr. Montanye on Curiosity, Geology, and Community

Good morning, and welcome back to Late Start Show. We are here with middle school science teacher, head of the house at Shaker Campus, and middle school soccer coach, Mr. Bo Montagna. How are you, Mr.

Montagna? I'm doing great today, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited.

Of course, thanks for making the trip up from the Shaker Campus. So we always start at the beginning with our guests. What were you like as a kid, and were you always into science growing up? Yeah, so in short, as a kid, I was weird, and I still am.

I'm really big into sports, really big into science. The big thing is I just like to kind of know everything. I've always wanted to know everything, and every time I try to figure something out, it then leads me to like 30 more questions, and that eventually would mean that one day I just had a teacher go, you're a scientist, you realize this, right? Which is like, no, I just want to know everything.

They're like, yeah, that's the point. You know, moving kind of into your teenage years, where did you go to high school, and what was Mr. Montagna like as a high school student? Were you kind of like, as more in high school, were you more focused in science?

Did you play sports, and kind of what sports were they more specifically? Yeah, so going, I'm not from the state of Ohio. I'm from where New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont come together. I came from a sleepy little town called Steventown that has a population density of 52 people per square mile.

I'm pretty sure there's more than 52 people around the corner here right now. So going into high school, I was, I'm huge into sports. I played, I was a three sport athlete every year. I, was, I could be.

I played some basketball since I was probably five years old, picked up soccer a little bit. My main sport was lacrosse. But really what it was is I just want, again, when I want to say that I want to know everything. I was a mathlete in high school.

Like I went to MIT for math competitions. I was captain of my lacrosse team for three straight years, captain of the basketball team for two years, captain of the soccer team for two years. And really it was, what can I learn? What can I do?

What can I be weird about? I was a teacher. I could teach, and I would teach a lot of math. I was a teacher.

I was a professor. I was a fair play teacher. I was a good lecturer in math. I was a good lecturer for people who didn't know it.

I was a good teacher for people who I know well. I went to college few years later and got worried about this time. The problem is, as you guys are aware, I have no shame. So I was also the math prefect.

I was the science prefect. I was just a random person who was trying to get people involved in everything. At a day student at a boarding school. It was really weird.

And having just that small amount of people at your school, did that build a sense of community for you? did that build a sense of community for you it did community is huge so the school i went to was based on shaker values which if you guys don't know shakers i mean we shaker heights right uh it's shaking quakers and they're all about community uh you've probably heard the song simple gifts at some time in your life i had to sing it every single week for four years and it was the worst worst moments of my life but community is a huge thing and getting up we had my graduating class was the largest one it had 35 kids in it there was 100 kids in the school grades 9 to 12 so realistically you knew everybody your teachers knew everybody like i said it was a boarding school so i knew where every teacher lived and it was within a five minute walk of where i was currently taking class you know after high school you went to cogate university which obviously the best yeah going from kind of this class at 35 to like a larger to a college that has obviously a lot larger of a student population is kind of a big change what made you really choose cogate and was it maybe the campus or the academics or the people or just a specific program so as you guys are now juniors you're going to start doing college visits and i did the whole sweep so i was a 4.0 a plus student my entire high school career i got one b ever and it was my ceramics class because one of my projects exploded in the kiln but what are you going to do i went to the colgate campus and i walked on there and it was just a moment of like oh this is the first time i've ever been to the colgate campus and i was like oh this is the place for me it's up on a hill it's middle of the woods you're kind of isolated the town of hamilton new york has like 3 000 people in it which felt like home the college doubled the size of the town and as i was going through the tour it's hey they have this they have that they have that and i never grew up with anything i used to drive 30 minutes to a different state to get groceries so having walking distance from everything blew my mind but it wasn't gray and painful like cornell looked we don't terribly like cornell from colgate so you know how it goes and spoiler alert you end up um geology is your main focus but when you first came to college did you know that you wanted to focus in geology or were you kind of open to all the difference absolutely not and actually geology wasn't my only degree weirdly enough i came in and my goal was to be a science major of some sort actually i was going looking into astronomy and astrophysics because this way i could tell everyone i was a rocket scientist right but uh i got into one astronomy class i actually got into two which when you're filling out college classes you kind of request it i got into two so my advisor's like hey let's swap you out one i know you didn't expect to get into both take this mega geology which is planet-wide geology so i took it i'm like whoa this stuff is this is cool it's like how the world works this is literally what i've always wanted to know and then within four years i was an isotope geochemist with a published paper and i also got bored and said oh cool i've always liked like ancient greek stuff right so i took an ancient greek class and they said if you take this class they'll send you to greece for a three-week trip i'm like well yeah i'm gonna do that they're like but try to take one more class so i took another class and they're like well you're already two classes in i'm like i am i should probably take another class so i have a second major in classical studies with an emphasis on ancient greek and i used to sit and translate ancient greek plays for homework every night you know hi college isn't really kind of all about the labs and lectures and we know you also had a lot of fun the intramural kind of sports side victoria best name ever you played kind of intramural softball at colgate right what position did you play what other sports did you also play we played intramural everything we had intramural football soccer bowling basketball softball it was slow pitch softball um and there was one more i'm blanking on uh we actually finished we were the highest finishing team that was not a fraternity we finished fourth in the overall standings my senior year won three championships i was the pitcher in most sports i play i'm the one who if you mess it up everything's going wrong so i was the pitcher i was the goalie i was actually the quarterback on the football team i was the center on the basketball team i mean in bowling i was just the guy who bowled but still yeah and so you mentioned you weren't in a fraternity um or at least your team that you were part of wasn't so what was it like building that community at colgate and being a part of all those different things but not being specific to one fraternity yeah so the great thing about colgate is you can't actually rush a frat your freshman year so you get to know everybody first and the first week just like you guys do here they have a kind of activities fair so i went through and signed up for almost all of them and then i actually attended about half of them and i got really into about five of them and through that then my friends started to kind of get me into things so what you'll find is you if you find like i owed a friend a favor and they needed me to they need another guy for ballroom dancing so they're like hey you owe me a favor we need somebody for this week can you come help us out so i did and then i kept going back and then i kept going back and kept getting better and then it turned out i actually performed in one of colgate's like greatest traditions as dance fest so twice a year a thousand plus people i have this three thousand person school like pack into our chapel and we just watched all the dance groups perform and i was on the group so i was doing ballroom so that's actually how i met my wife we were paired together for a ballroom dancing that's pretty so i have a video of the first time we did that and i kept doing it so i ended up doing ballroom dancing ballet dancing hip-hop dancing wow uh got into a group and i was like oh my god i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this because the guy who ran my freshman seminar was into curling i was the vice captain of our collegiate curling team as we went and competed at a curling rink down like 30 minutes down the road like multiple days a week did all the intramural sports with people that were just on my floor i was that really weird kid it's like man i need some friends so i'm like what are people like oh people love lollipops so like i just kept a bag of lollipops in canada i'm like hey dude you want a lollipop yeah who are you oh nice to meet you which i know sounds really weird but neither of you surprised by that story you know one of the other like legendary traditions at colgate is geo pizza so we've heard kind of geology students at colgate make geology themed pizzas as kind of a fun challenge can you kind of explain what geo pizza is and did you take part in it and are there any kind of designs that you really vividly remember so when when i was working with geology one of the i was worked with isotopes so with the things you can't see i figured out how the continents smashed together and a bunch of my friends were volcanologists so like we went and climbed volcanoes so the the idea was we want a big pizza party and it was you have to make the most geologically themed pizza so mine was like continental accretion like this the island arc slapping into the side of the continent to form like you know massachusetts so that one was okay one of my friends though made this awesome volcano pizza that you just stack the pepperonis up you put a bunch of cheese in the middle and as it melts it just kind of oozes out and over which i gotta give them credit was one of the sickest things i've ever seen but it's just one of those traditions where you take your thing in geology and you try to make a pizza out of it and just make it look cool and then you just chow a bunch of pizza afterwards because what else you gonna do you're in college right how'd they taste well somewhere somewhere meatier than others if you got a bite of the of the volcano like i hope you like pepperoni you know after colgate you made the leap to graduate school at the university of akron what led you to kind of akron for your master's and can you break down the goal of your master's ccs in kind of simple terms for us non-geologists i mean what kind of question were you trying to answer about lake tanganyika tanganyika over the past 400 years and kyle why was that question important to you that's an awesome question so i took two years and went and worked as a full-time tutor and my now wife at the time girlfriend went with me and we made a deal two years where i live which was over there two years where you live she grew up in newberry ohio went to laurel and then after that we'll figure out where to go what she didn't tell me is that once we moved here we were never moving so we did our two years there i realized i wanted to go back and get my grad degree and so i just searched the entire state of ohio and when you're looking at grad degrees in science you're not looking for an institution so much as you are looking for a person so the guy i worked with came from oregon state and he was down in akron for a couple years i was the only male grad student he ever had and i'm still convinced it's because he needed me to unpack the lab so he had a bunch of stuff that works he said i didn't actually take a chemistry class after high school until grad school which is really weird when you're doing geochemistry it doesn't really make sense but like i was a staple isotope geochemist that hadn't taken chemistry since sophomore year of high school so when i got there like most grad schools didn't actually want to even look at me because i was missing one of those key classes that they thought was necessary minus the fact that like i took a class that was past that level so doing that he looked and said no like you obviously know what you're talking about you wrote a paper on isotopes so he's like i got this project we have these lake sentiments from africa from lake tanganyika which is one of the african great lakes i want you to come look at and do some chemistry on would you be interested i said well yeah that sounds amazing uh sadly i didn't get to go to africa which would have been awesome instead we had the policy where you went and got the samples for the next person so i did a three-week research cruise off the coast of costa rica reset like getting deep sea sediments from an ocean floor event but what was really cool is looking at the lakes in africa is as sediment builds up over time you can see how it has changed so the community there was applying for relief from climate climate change for relief from the un and we needed to prove to them that either it was climate change or it was overfishing by them so we looked at the concentration of these little things called diatoms which are primary producers or photosynthesizers that live at the top of a lake if the level of them was changing then it was probably climate change whereas if they didn't change but the fishing went down like the fish went down it was probably overfishing so what we did is we analyzed the silica content to figure out how many diatoms were there and we scaled it down to about 500 years but we had to deal with the fact that this lake backed up and like had a giant bloom of diatoms for a period of time and had to do some correction it sounds really nerdy and it so was but it was so much fun because i'm just sitting there and you can't actually see any of the things you're working on although that is weirdly enough how i destroyed my sense of smell because you had to get all of the like organic stuff off the diatom shells so you had to boil it in a mixture of hydrochloric oxalic and sulfuric acids which is great unless you leave the fumehood bit too open and one of my friends walked in and said hey what's that smell and i looked at her and i said what smell are you talking about she's like it sounds like it's coming from it smells like it's coming from that mixture you're boiling i'm like oh i can't smell anything right now and i slowly realized that i actually dissolved some of my ability to smell so yay science safety right still can't smell it no it's like there's some smells i get like i can get cinnamon simmons main one like like subtle like you know how guys just really need you know sometimes you just really need some deodorant i can't tell like i can't like my wife yesterday told me like there's a hey there's a chipmunk that died in our basement it's like i can't smell that it's awesome teaching middle school boys i would not be able to teach seventh graders if i could smell them i guarantee you you know every research project really has its challenges what was one of the kind of hardest parts of working on that thesis obviously you uh ever in every project you kind of hit dead ends and have experiments fail so how do you kind of i messed up a decimal point and had to redo six months of work so in doing my unit conversions i accidentally dropped the uh what was it i i was supposed to be million i accidentally put it to senti so it was a factor of 10 and the dissolution wasn't strong enough it wasn't dissolving the things it was supposed to dissolve because the solution was a tenth of strong as it was supposed to be so i took six six and redid it in about 90 days wow yeah it was man i didn't realize i could science that fast i guess like in the first six months like you don't really know what you're doing anyway and like you have to do the research like you have to read all these background papers i was working directly off of somebody else's doctoral thesis because she had made one argument and we looked at the day and said i don't know man that doesn't quite look right so she never actually published the exact methodology to make her mixtures so i had to figure it out and what we're yeah here we are now you know was teaching on your radar during grad school i mean some grad students kind of ta and discovered that they love teaching others are kind of just purely focused on research did you have any teaching experience other than the tutoring account before the university of akron yeah so i worked as a full-time tutor and while i was working there they needed another math teacher and being a former mathlete at went to that school it's like yeah i'll teach algebra one that's easy and then the next year i got gta and i was like oh yeah i'm gonna try algebra two and pre-calc added to my load and taught an elective in geology then i left to go do geology and while i was there uh we had a it wasn't a teaching it was a research assistant and the teaching assistant job assistantship that i had so i actually got paid to go to grad school now granted it was like 10 grand but it wasn't negative like i came out with no loans from that it was great so i taught a lab uh i taught geology for engineers i was teaching engineering students basic geology so that our bridges wouldn't fail hopefully and get buried and i say this because like these engineers went to akron and are still in the area and work around here i know some of them do i ran into one at cvca as a coach a couple years ago actually you played against him when he was a coach there uh so did a bunch of ta and research stuff there i did 150 person classes i did eight kid labs i ran the whole gamut and that was it was a fun experience and coming out of college i had two options i could either go work as a teacher or i actually had through my professor and into a phd program in pittsburgh i was going to work on the anthropogenic effects of nitrogen isotopes which is just how humans messed up nitrogen isotopes and how you can see like human effects um two things changed stopped me from doing that one man i really didn't like baby writing papers i'm real like we got a lot of skills in life pay more attention to your english classes it'll help you everywhere else because uh there's a lot of edits that need to happen when i write but two my wife grew up in newberry was from here um i don't make i don't bring home the bacon in our family that's she actually is the primary earner and she wanted to be with her family and didn't want to move to pittsburgh which is only a two-hour drive but like i said she never told me we were never leaving but she knew it the whole time like we we have a house here we've got a nice house that's 10 minutes from where her parents grew up in the same neighborhood as her brother and her sister so looking at it all right us was a great option because her brother went to us he graduated i think it was 05. he actually knows many of the teachers here still which is man quite a loop and actually i worked with mrs osborne did you know mrs osborne you might have just missed her so she taught my wife in fifth grade and then with dr brown who i know you ran into dr brown um her son and i played pokemon together so like it's just a weird cleveland family connections all around that's really really cool so 2016. rolls around you're officially a teacher at us what attracted you to us specifically was it you know the all boys environment the school's reputation or something about the science program like what brought you here looking at schools all around so i worked at a school and it was a school that didn't have great resources had a great community program and was very into nature but really needed help and didn't have the academic rigor i teach stuff to my middle schoolers here that like i used to teach to high schoolers like the kids here they're they're good they're smart they work i mean you guys are examples of that so doing that looking at us it's like this is a school that has a lot of great kids these kids are going to go do something and more importantly they want to learn on top of that i have the resources to teach them what they need to know i'm not going to be worried about can i actually show these kids what these rocks look like if they want to go out are they actually not going to be able to work with these force ramps no we had all the resources necessary so they still had children and they had kids so going down the spectrum of families постро who um um um so um um a long time ago over to i don't know why i was making these voks by� ia- fascinated by that many years so but having the family experience that went with it like the words i heard were just amazing and the schools lived tonight i've always said if i ever leave us it's because i quit teaching there's no point in going teach anywhere else you're not gonna find a better environment well that's powerful but do you recall your first day or week in the classroom at us i'm sure you're still adjusting to that do you have any funny new teacher moments um here let me give you one from my interview i was talking with Dr. Brown and without any guidance do we hit the topic water paths And they're like, so why do you want to teach middle school boys? And I looked at them and I'm like, well, I'm just a really big middle school boy. It's true though, isn't it?

Yeah. No, I still remember the first day seeing my name on the plaque. It was great. I still remember the first group of kids I taught.

I still remember the first kid in the first class that walked in and being like, oh man, I'm sewing over my head. Middle schoolers are so weird. They're so small. I taught high school.

I had worked with college kids. Man, 12, 13 year olds, they're something. But no, my favorite every year is probably the Archimedes density lab where we take the students and we measure their density by putting them in a tank full of water, which is usually very cold, makes for the best pictures and measuring the volume and just working through the science process of that. But there are kids every year that you just look at and go, wow, I still, I like, we don't want to give ours in demerits, but of course I have a favorite one.

Like I was teaching nuclear forces. And eighth grader stands up as soon as I mentioned the strong force, just goes strong force and flexes in the middle of class. It's like, I have to give you a demerit, but that was hilarious. You know, middle school boys, as you kind of said, are like really known just for their energy and kind of curiosity and sometimes short attention spans.

Kyle, what was, um, what do you kind of enjoy most about teaching middle schoolers and how you kind of tap into that energy sometimes in a positive way? Oh, they're just into everything. Like I can just find anything and be like, Hey, let's do this. And mine is five minutes of moaning and groaning because you know, puberty.

Right. But they're like, all right, cool. Let's give it a try. They're not too cool for school, which is great.

When you teach high schoolers, they've already decided I'm not a science kid. There is no such thing in seventh grade. You're not a science. It's there is no, I'm a science kid or not a science kid.

It's this looks interesting. Let's check it out. And when you can work with middle schoolers, if you can put things in their hands, like, like in a rocket lab, when they launch things, the ideas that kids come up with are amazing. Like it's totally not how I think.

Well, mostly, but the ideas they come up with are completely unexpected. And the way they approach problems is amazing. So you take this kind of like new ingenuity and see how they apply it to a problem that you've seen a hundred times. And it gives you a whole different outlook on the world.

You mentioned that Archimedes lab, are there any other experiments or labs that you do with the kids that you really enjoy? Uh, almost all of them. Sadly, I had actually cut some out as the curriculums changed over the years, but the couple big ones, it's the very second day of class. We make the kid.

I make the kids. Try to make an egg sink, float, and hover in water, which is fun. And it's all about density. And I know you remember that I could see it.

Although I think you were, were you virtual that time? I was, I was, that was terrible. I don't mind. I still remember that.

Um, the rocket lab is probably the big one. So we take these little 30 millimeter film capsules, spray like isopropyl or ethanol in them and try to see how you can launch them across the room. But really it's a independent research project of determining your independent variable to make it fly further and writing a report to say. They say like, no, no, I'm right at changing the fuel is what matters.

If you can make it a competition, they're into everything. But probably the thing that gives me the best stuff to look at is the geologic time skills. Every go, everybody has to take geologic time, which is four and a half billion years. And your mind can't comprehend that and try to make it relevant to something that is in your life.

So like Aaron Moss made a baseball field and said, oh, if this event happened, two thirds of earth's history ago, it's two thirds down the baseball field. Wow. Look how close everything is. There's a football fields.

Do you remember? Do you remember what you did? Don't. I remember doing the project.

Uh huh. I won't let you sit on it. I bet you I bet I'll come back to you. And if not, it's going to eat at you.

Yeah, well, look at it. He's so torn up about it now. I've had people like build things and like pour resin into it. I've had people make, oh man, some of the worst music videos of all time.

It's great because it allows like the kids to own it. But really, they're all getting the same thing from a different approach. Well, I remember when I shadowed. It was your.

Class and you guys were shooting. It was the rocket lab and I was just like these kids like shooting things. I'm like, this is sweet. Like that might have been the selling point.

It was pretty cool. I think you were there on the day. We were all in formal dress too. Aren't you?

Oh, I don't know. I think you were that whole day was a blur. I, I remember like my shadow couple of people I met. The rest was just all blurred, but that's fair.

It's really going to eat you up. Isn't it? Basketball court. And if it wasn't, it was around the world and I think it was different places around the world.

Like. Like the diameter of the. Circumference. But yeah, it was the circumference.

It was. It was the circumference of the world. You thought about doing the circumference of a basketball and then you started to do it and you were really bored. It was really, yeah, it was really bad.

So then I decided to do. You took a string and you taped it around the whole thing and you flagged it with little sticky notes. Yeah, I still remember that. That was really, really fun.

Yeah, that was really, really cool. I knew you'd get there. You know, kind of beyond the classroom, one of the things I've also I also kind of got to experience in middle school is you coaching. Right.

So what kind of sports or teams have you been involved in? What have you dealt with as a coach at the middle school and how has that experience really shaped you? So every year I've been here, I've coached soccer. I started as our B soccer coach.

And just these last two years, I am now one of our A soccer coaches, along with Mrs. Hamburg. I also actually used to be our A lacrosse coach as well. What I realized very quickly is that it takes a lot of time after school.

And when I started when like when I had my first child, my daughter is now seven. So seven years ago, if I was coaching, I was gone two thirds a year until about seven, eight o'clock at night. And it was rough. So eventually we had to drop lacrosse, even though that was my main sport and the sport I loved the most.

But what it is, is it's great because it lets you actually connect with the kids in a different way. I've built relationships. I don't teach every seventh grader, sadly. So there are seventh graders that I only know through soccer, but we have great relationships because we'd see each other out in the field.

We'd go run around, we'd play around. It's a lot of fun, but it's a whole different type of learning. It's a lot of character building, a lot of person building and a lot of team building, which is really nice. And those relationships that you build on the field, you don't ever build them in the classroom the same way.

I know both of you guys are athletes. I still remember teaching you how to play goalie with some level of success. Yeah. And it's a completely different way you see each other.

And like, I never saw you like that until you were out on the field and we never interacted in those same ways. And sadly, I never got to teach you to coach you, but I always thought it would be fun. But like you've seen it with your baseball, you approach the world in a different way. Also, it's really fun.

So it really annoys some kids when you start talking about the physics of the flight of the soccer ball and the Bernoulli effect, and they do not enjoy the Bernoulli effect when you're talking about hitting a free kick in soccer. Well, another one of your big roles beyond teaching and coaching, I don't know what the official title is, but it's basically the head of the house system for the Shaker campus. You nailed it. So, well, can you explain what the house system is at U.S., maybe specifically for the Shaker campus and how it works?

Oh, it is my probably my favorite part about it. I grew up in the U.S., so much like Harry Potter, we're all given houses, much less fun sorting. I would love to make a hat that just told you where to go, but that's not sadly not in my wheelhouse. So with the house system, it's a way to build community and community is a big driver for me, like having connections, having fun, seeing each other in different ways and making friends because you guys are brothers.

You're going to be here for the rest of your life, whether and once you leave this school, it's always going to be part of you. My brother-in-law was in McKinley. I know this. He hasn't been here since 2005.

His net, my nephew, his son is now in McKinley. It's a family tradition. It's a legacy. It's means something.

So we take this and throughout the year, we hold a bunch of competitions. So you guys have your upper school house cup. We have our lower school house cup. The main overlap, of course, is Founders Day, which was a great event.

What was that? Four weeks ago now? Wow. That's been a long, long fall.

So we have four house assemblies throughout the year. Our first one actually is tomorrow, right? Before. Our big event in the pep rally.

And we celebrate everything to do with the school. We celebrate achievements both individually and collectively. One of my goals since I was one of the people that took over. So technically, it's a co-head of house because there are two other people that do it with me.

Mrs. Bailey and Mrs. Gazowski, who are both lower school and middle school, respectively. One of our goals is to celebrate the achievements of everybody and what they do both in school and out of school.

So we got kids that win the spelling bee, win the GOB, and they earn their team house. We have kids like Matthew Cheggy, who wrote a book, and it's published on our U.S. social media feeds. And if you are important enough and if you're doing something amazing enough that our school wants to show what you are doing to the world, you should earn some points for your house. One of our goals has been to up the amount of participation in the house system and up the amount of points that you can get throughout the year.

So last year, our winning team had, I believe it was 1,400 points. From Founders Day, the winning team scores 100 points. 90, 80, 70, all the way down for the lower school. Then we have Lower School Founders Day, and we're trying to get all the little kids, all the medium kids to interact, to build that community. We had one student last year in Hawley who raised us from ninth place all the way up to third.

We weren't last. We'll take it. But all the way up to third. And he became somewhat of a local legend because his work in math counts, his work in the GCCTM math competitions, his work on his junior fellows project.

He was lifting the whole house, and it inspired other people like, oh, look what he's doing. Maybe I can get myself more involved in the community, and I can help my house too. Plus, my son, he's now in kindergarten. He's five years old.

Every day, every Friday, he's like, we get to wear our purple shirts. We're going to win this year. How can I help? I can try to do the puzzle of the week.

He can barely read. He's still going to try to do it. And it's all about getting engagement, and it's expanding the boundaries of all these kids, and to expand the community as a whole. That's pretty cool.

You know, as Head House, you work with a lot of kind of student leaders like house captains or kind of prefects. What's it like kind of mentoring those students as they plan those kind of assemblies and motivate their houses? And how do you kind of guide them to really getting their house amped? I currently have 10 pumpkins sitting in the back of my classroom, and I'm very excited to see what actually happens with it.

So it's an experience because it's a lot of trial and failure. So they're planning a house assembly, and they want to open up some pumpkins to reveal the house shirts. Great concept. They are now learning what is involved.

And getting that to happen, they are going to carve some pumpkins, scoop out the guts, bring it to our compost pile out in the Arboretum, get house shirts, stuff them in there, realize they're gonna have to wash them afterwards, which is going to be a fun moment for them, and then reveal it live on stage. The amount of effort, it's really helping them to learn what it takes to be a leader in our community. So part of that means I have to sit back and let them take the reins sometimes. But it also means that we have to give a lot of guidance.

So there's so many. There's so many great ideas, but they're lurking with an audience that ranges in age from 5 to 14, and that is a tough age range to meet. So to give ideas, to give suggestions, to give guidance without ever actually telling them what to do, letting them take the ownership. They design almost every house competition that we run with some suggestions and a little bit of help because they want to participate too.

But really, it's setting them in a place to say, how can I step forward and show my house what I'm doing? And then it's encouraging them at house lunch, sitting with not just your friends, but sitting with the other kids, the younger kids, going down, we take a little bit of time out of class, we had Gershon Panu, our Goodwillie house captain, came down and presented the lower school Founders Day Cup to Goodwillie after they won it this year, and he got to, he had to come out of class and he had the responsibility of making it up, but came down, helped throw the ribbons on the trophy of Goodwillie house, brought it in as they got announced, stood in the middle of there, brought it in, brought it in, brought it in, brought it in, brought it in. Raised it up, brought all the Goodwillie kids with him, let them all touch the trophy, the little things that build the memories that those younger guys are going to remember forever, and realizing that those memories that our current house captains have came from other people that did this. So how can they help generate those?

And now switching gears here to your family, you made the decision this year to enroll your son at US, which congratulations, that's a big decision and move. How is it now that your son has been with you at school? I suddenly have so many more reasons that I need to go talk to lower school teachers. Because every time I do, he walks by and gives me a hug.

And it's the greatest moment ever. We thought about bringing him last year, but he is very young for the grade. He's an August birthday. So he was at junior K, but at Laurel school last year where my daughter is.

He was so excited to come here. We were very nervous because we had to get him to like it before he came here. So we brought him in a couple times like, look, this is going to be your future school. Now he's there every day and I can see him eating lunch.

And every time I walk by, I have to say it actually has helped me a lot. Because. I never had a reason to connect a huge amount with the lower school. Being there and walking in and like seeing their assemblies, I can see the enthusiasm he has.

He tells me about his friends and what they talk about. And it makes it much easier for me to connect what we're doing up in the middle school and the house stuff to the lower school kids. So my nephew is actually also in junior K as well. And we got the junior K to come up and do a freeze dance with some of our senior prefects on their lower school founders day.

It was very entertaining seeing Griff up there. I know he was one of your guests. A couple of weeks ago, uh, seeing him up there trying to do a freeze dance with a bunch of kids that probably go to his knees. Right.

But to see that moment of all those guys together and to get to experience it myself is something that I never dreamed I'd be able to do after all he was born COVID like that was, uh, it's not been five years. Has it? Doesn't seem like it. Well, we've also heard that you're a big Pokemon fan, which is a biggest nerd in the world, but it's cool.

I mean, it's unique. It's unique to you. And how'd your love of Pokemon begin? So I was born in 1990.

Pokemon was released in 1995 officially. And the anime came to us airwaves in the late nineties. So I think 96 to 98 area. That is the time when I was, you know, like six to eight years old.

I still remember every Saturday morning and we're going to get that spoiler. We'll get to the Y at the end, right? This is going to come back by the way. I still remember the theme song.

Every Saturday morning going, I want to be the very best, right? Dude, that was like formulative for my, my life. Um, through a lot of interest, eventually it faded out. I still remember the first Pokemon card.

I got, went to high school. It wasn't cool anymore. Went to college. When you go to college, everything is cool again, because you're going to find somebody else interested.

I grew up in the time, like before the internet was everywhere. So I hit internet like high school time. So I started finding people like, dude, Pokemon. Like Pokemon is awesome.

Like it really is. So I went back to the store, bought my first pack again. And my friend's like, I'll play with you. Cause he plays magic, the gathering.

So like, great. You'll play card game with me. So I started playing it. And that's when streaming started to become slightly bigger.

So I started watching a couple of streams that I realized like, oh, I love board games. And it's just a big board game that changes as you go. So I started playing it a bit. Then I started going to a local league and then I started going to some like tournaments and some competitions.

Really? It took off when I hit Ohio because Ohio is one of. The Pokemon hotbeds of the United States. I know we actually have a former world's top 10 finisher down in Akron.

Whole bunch of regional level tournament winners that are throughout the state. So then I started going to bigger tournaments. I went to North American international championships. Like I've got a top, I finished 76 that year and I missed out.

I keep missing out on the money, but like the tiniest things. It's so frustrating. Went to a bunch of tournaments, started going to a league consistently, then got asked if I could take it over. So I took over the league became, and I kid you not.

This is the thing, a certified Pokemon professor. So you have to work through the Pokemon company. You, you apply, you have to take tests and everything, but it's effectively a teacher of Pokemon. And besides getting some really cool swag, I had a nice shirt and had to go with it.

I used to run events, used to run leagues. Unfortunately, I moved slightly further away when my kids were born. So there's not one right near me where I am, but I still try to attend tournaments when I can. I was supposed to go to Pittsburgh for a regional tournament a couple of weeks ago, but man, between soccer and the fall, I was just exhausted.

So I'm trying to find a couple more. I can go to. A little bit later this year, I'm sneakily trying to get my kids into it. I was going to say officially, if my wife listens to this, of course I am not.

I'm letting them choose their own adventure as they go. But there might be a few Pokemon plushies around. I actually build a lot of decks for kids. So like Ms.

Arnue, her daughter has a Pokemon deck I built for her because she got into it for a little bit. Uh, the pierces, I have given them some Pokemon decks, um, Darje, uh, not Darje, uh, Draigar, her son, her and I talk Pokemon, a new Pokemon game released. Oh. So today, so I will likely be playing that when I get home, but it's, once it's a part of your life, there's really no reason to get rid of it.

It's something that is a good influence. It's much like sports. I still follow all those sports leagues very closely. It's just one more thing.

That's a little bit easier to keep up with minus the ever changing meta of the game. You know, looking at kind of the overall view, um, you've been teaching at us for nearly 10 years now. How do you think you kind of changed your growing as a teacher? Kind of since that first year back in 2016, I've learned how to teach.

Um, so, uh, unlike many of your teachers, us does a great job of bringing both people who are trained as teachers and trained in the industry. So I was one that came as like, I have, I think it's four or five published geology papers. I'm one of like 20 people who do isotope, geochemistry of ma who did isotope, geochemistry of marbles up in Canada. Like there's only like five of us that do, and I know all of them.

Um, so when I came here, I taught high school kids. I'd worked with college kids. The one thing I hadn't done is actually teach middle school. I'm a teacher that was like a teacher for kids, but I began teaching elementary school with boys.

So I know the expectations. I know what to do, but there's little subtle things that you just learn as you go. And I try to surround myself with people that are like, in my opinion, amazing teachers and better teachers than I am. But that's because I'm always trying to improve.

And I just tried to pick up a little tips and tricks like that, like how to get the attention of a group of 20, 12 year olds, how to get a hook at the beginning of a lesson. when I first started teaching like you got to get their attention of course but I was also the kind of student that I just wanted to learn everything so the fact that like somebody didn't want to learn something was like very strange to me the first time I taught a class like what do you mean you don't want to know what do you mean you don't want to like just try it okay so what's let's make the connection so that's turned into my class now having those like sidebar connections so when we did geology we talk about Marilyn Monroe we talk about the monopoly of diamonds that the beers had forever and that class does more to hook people into minerals than anything else I did or we'll flash a bunch of gems and jewelry right we'll talk about the diamond tester tiktoks that you always see it's like well how do these work well let's talk about the electron the electrons transferring around carbon right so it's all the small little details like ultimately the classes are mostly the same but now I know how to make kids interested in the things I like yay rocks yeah well I mean you're obviously still in your time here teaching and but you've already influenced so many students here when you look ahead as to what your legacy might be when you do retire end up leaving here what do you hope that that will be I hope that one kid remembers one thing they learned in my class if I've done that I've done something successful the one sad part about teaching is hey sure there's a legacy but you'll forget about me after I've been gone everybody will you guys will go away and you'll learn all these cool things and if you remember just one thing that you did with me one class one moment one time on the field one podcast session one weird picture I showed you before the podcast session about what I looked like when I was in college in high school those moments mean that we've made a connection and if you can connect with the people around you you can truly change the world so if you want to change the world it starts with one person and the whole point of getting into teaching for me was if I really want change the world i gotta connect with one person first and once i've connected with one person i gotta connect with the next person so if i can connect with one person i've done my job so after i leave after i retire when i'm old and gray which it's not for a while oh it's a little gray but otherwise not for a while hopefully one person remembers one thing from my class and if i did that then hopefully somebody else does and maybe somebody wants to go check out geology or maybe somebody takes a geology class or maybe like on my way in like one kid talks to to a colgate rep to maybe consider going there right just little things like that maybe just seeing the world in a slightly different way and if not we tried but as long as somebody thinks about it one time i think i've won well i have a fun question for you here if you could go on a dream geology trip where would you go in unlimited funds and unlimited time so does it have to be someplace i haven't been already you okay so geology one of the reasons i got into it is also because i have now been to 10 different countries i didn't have a passport until college and i went to nine countries within two and a half years and most of it was for geology um i my goal is i want to see all of the active lava lakes in the world i've seen one in viarica in chile which was awesome i've never been to hawaii i really want to go there there's one in africa well there's two in africa i believe near agongo has one uh mount erebus in antarctica i have one friend who's a geologist and he's a geologist and he's a geologist who has done field work and actually two friends who've done field work in antarctica and they're amazing and i man i would love to go see that but also iceland because that's one of the other places and iceland's just one of those places you can see the northern lights and a lava lake at the same time and like it doesn't get much better it doesn't finally you know this is a question i'd like to ask all of our guests uh what is your why in other words kind of what really wakes you up each morning makes you want to come to school and what is kind of the core purpose or driving reason that really motivates you to teach and to learn and to learn and to teach to coach to mentor to do everything you do so do you remember earlier when i said the theme song i want to be the very best like no one ever was so i just want to be better every day no matter what i do and that sounds really weird and vague but that means every time like i go out in the field and coach soccer i'm trying to do it a little bit better than the day before because if you're not getting better in my opinion you're getting worse like there is no staying still either you're improving or the rest of the world's catching up to you so every morning when i wake up it's just how can i do it a little bit better than yesterday or how can i do it better than the last time i did this uh and that's impressive because i really am not a morning person uh my my sleep schedule is not one i would ever recommend to anybody but it involves like i most of my thesis in college was written after 8 p.m and before 4 a.m so every morning when i get up i get myself there it's like all right let's drink some water let's get going and when you step in front of a group of people i for some reason i'm very able to just kind of like code shift and be like great we're at this moment now how can i do a little better how can i be better than i was yesterday what can i learn today that i didn't know yesterday what can i change today that i couldn't change yesterday so i want to be the very best like nobody ever plus well mr montana it's been great having on the show today thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts experiences and just stories with us and to our listeners thank you so much for tuning in and we will hope we hope you will join us next wednesday for the next episode of late start show pleasure is all mine guys thank you again