More summer memories

When I got a little older - high school aged - summers got busier. A couple years I helped my dad run a summer program for "gifted and talented" students (Or maybe that was when I was already an undergrad? I know my freshman year in high school I did the program, partly as a "we have someone 'on the inside' doing it who will be open about any problems with it"). It was in geohydrology - essentially, collecting water from a stream system*, analyzing it for the various constituents (this was water that originated as groundwater, so the mineral composition told you something about what stratum it came from)

(*I did six or eight tributaries to Furnace Run, a larger stream in the area. The results were interesting enough that I presented them at the Ohio Junior Academy of Science that fall. All I remember of the presentation is that afterward I got a *horrific* migraine - one of the first of my life - probably from stress, and I lay in the backseat of the car while my parents got dinner (it was a long drive from our house. I think my brother stayed with friends that time). At least by that point it was dark out. And my parents brought me back bread from the restaurant but I couldn't eat it at that point.)

It was interesting to analyze the water. For the cations (Calcium, Magnesium....sodium, maybe?) we used an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer. Fundamentally what these do (as I understand it) is draw the sample up, volatilize it, run it through a flame, and the particular atomic "fingerprint" (the spectrum, I guess) of the mineral can be detected with a special lamp (and you can calibrate it so it tells you quantities).

The AA in my dad's lab was really, really old-skool, which made it cool: you had to change out the lamps yourself (a different one for each element; they were in little foam-lined plastic cases labeled with what it was used for the detection of). And the flame was just behind a little door and one of my dad's things was to show the students how it worked by opening the little door during the calibrations (as I remember, for some of the elements, at the higher concentrations, you could see the flame change color).

Probably not safe in the way that schools emphasize safety now, but it was certainly cool. And no one ever got hurt; my dad and his tech were really picky about who was allowed to do what and also about things like safety goggles and standing back a safe distance.

The modern AAs are all enclosed and more automated and are "safer" but they are probably less fun and less impressive.

Anions (sulfate, phosphate, etc.) were analyzed using a column chromatograph. Which was less interesting because there was less to see, and also, it was a really finicky machine, and sometimes only Tom (my dad's tech guy) could get it to work. So Tom ran the analyses and we stood and watched.

Oh, there were other cool things. I remember estimating the size of a watershed using a topographic map by tracing it out onto tissue paper, and then carefully cutting it out, and then cutting out a piece of tissue paper that scaled to something like 5 square kilometers....and weighing each on a super-sensitive scale, and using math to estimate the area of the watershed. (I suppose now one would use something like a Geographic Information System to do that, but this was the mid-1980s.).

I think also that's where I learned some of the things like the ways you can check your calculations on things to be sure you did it right (this is something I always, always emphasize to my students, that when there's a place where you can self-check, you should, but most of them don't pay attention) and also some of the basic lab-safety stuff. And also how to read topographic maps which....that's one of those things that until I started teaching, I just assumed everyone knew about and knew how to read. (And they are probably used much, much less now than they once were. Back in the day, back-country hikers and campers used them *a lot,* I am sure there are now apps that take over that function).

I dunno. I tend to come down on the side of "more knowledge is always better than less knowledge" and that knowing different ways to do things (like, the method I learned for estimating watershed area) helps you be able to think creatively and come up with solutions for "how do I do this" more quickly than if you didn't have that experience.

Other summers when I was a college student, I took summer classes at Akron - I took my Physics there in order to avoid having to take it along with Organic Chemistry (something people always warned me about was "don't take Orgo and Physics together, they're both really hard and involved labs"). And I took a few cognate sciences when I was there, and re-took pre-Calc because I felt like I didn't learn it well the first time.

And honestly, it was better as a young adult - who had grown past, perhaps, the traditional "kid" ways of having fun - to be occupied in the summers.