Tapping Into Learning: Maple Sugaring with K-12 Students in New Hampshire

Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today, we have a chance to talk with two educators from New Hampshire about maple sugaring with students in K to 12 schools. Mary Hartigan Demers teaches eighth grade life science at Hillside Middle School in Manchester, New Hampshire. She is entering her 37th year teaching grade eight. And Becky Denslow is a family and consumer science teacher at Great Brook School in Antrim, New Hampshire. Becky teaches fifth to eighth grade and is in her 12th year in this current position and her 19th year teaching overall. Welcome Becky and Mary.

Becky: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Mary: Thank you. 

Dinah: Just to start, could you each introduce yourself to our listeners and let us know a little bit about where you teach and what you teach and the grade levels you work with?

Mary: So I'm Mary Hartigan Demers and I teach eighth grade life science in Manchester, New Hampshire. And I pretty much teach a biology class to eighth graders. And I've been at the same school now for 36 years and I'm entering my 37th year of teaching right now.

Becky: And I'm Becky Denslow. I'm the family and consumer science teacher at Great Brook School in Antrim, New Hampshire, which is in the sort of central western part of the state. And I teach all the students in the school in a year's time. I have them each for one quarter.

Dinah: Great. Now we know your voices. So could you each talk about what inspired you to bring maple sugaring into your classroom or school program? I think some people might think it's an overwhelming task to do, and so it's exciting to have two educators who do this on the regular. And if you could just share about what inspired you to do this.

Mary: I, as a member of the UNH Agroforestry Group, was speaking with a teacher from Golfstown who happens to do maple sugaring at his school. He came, met with me, and I was like, "Oh, I think it's something I might want to get into." And so Mike Smith, who runs the program, they hooked me up with the forester. We came, we walked at the Dairyfield Park, which is where the school is located, and they determined that there were eight maple trees that I pretty much could healthily tap that were right across the street from the school. And then the city of Manchester, I had to get approval from the forester from the city. He gives me the okay, put a sign on the trees and say it's a project.

Dinah: So Mary, it's going to be interesting to talk to you and Becky because Mary, I think you're in a more urban area.

Mary: Yes. Oh yeah.

Dinah:  And so the trees that you're tapping are in a public park?

Mary: Yes. So that's why I had to bring the buckets in every night. So there became a safety concern really because you just don't know who's in the park. And so I would have to stay at school or go back. Thankfully, I don't live far from school. I would go back before dark, collect sap, bring it home, bury it in the snow.

Dinah: Well, this'll be interesting to hear from both of you and compare your systems. Becky, what got you into doing this work? And then we'll dig into the process.

Becky: Yeah, so I made maple syrup when I was a kid, and then in my adult life I hadn't made it at all. And then in 2020, I guess it was the fall of 2019, there was a New Hampshire Ag in the Classroom newsletter, and in it they were giving away three sets of buckets and taps, so 10 buckets and taps if you had to write a little essay about why you wanted to do it. And so I wrote about how I think it would be a fun thing for my school to do, and we had plenty of maple trees. And so I was given that grant, and so I got all those buckets. So I remember driving to Concord and picking them up, and this is February of 2020. And then we tapped all the trees. We tapped 10 trees on campus and then COVID hit. And the buckets just, we had boiled once on my old Coleman stove at school, and then the buckets just sat there. I ended up being able to finally come onto campus the end of April and collect them, and they were all over the ground and some had overflow. It was a mess, but yep. So that's how I originally got started with it, and we've been doing it ever since.

Dinah: Oh, it'll be interesting to hear how it went from that time to the present. So it's going to be interesting to hear from each of you because your walk through as you explain your process will be much different. Maybe start with you, Becky. Could you walk us through your maple sugaring process and explain how the students actually participate so that people who are listening can think about their own students and how do we engage our students in actually this process?

Becky: Sure. So for the first five years that we did it, I just did it with my family consumer science classes. We only had those 10 buckets. So we would go out and just with my classes, we would tap trees. I'd let the eighth graders tap one, two trees and the seventh graders tap two trees kind of thing. And then we'd just go out, we'd rotate through the classes and they'd go out and collect the sap the next day, and then we'd just boil it down once or twice a week. So I did that for five years on my old Coleman stove, propane, and the principal would buy a few propane tanks for me, like the big propane tanks in a year's time. And then this past year I became, or I guess it was two years ago now, I became involved with New Hampshire Ag in the classroom. There was a maple cohort, and they were looking for 20 teachers throughout the state who were interested in maple. And so I signed up and I joined it, and with that came a classroom grant. And so we were able to buy an evaporator from Vermont Evaporator Company. So we finally had a real evaporator. And so now last year at our first staff meeting, I floated the idea of everybody getting involved and every advisory, so every homeroom having a tree because we're a rural campus, we have plenty of maple trees and everybody was really excited about it. So now the entire school is involved. So every kid is in advisory and every advisory has a tree, and that's their tree that they collect sap from every morning during maple season.

Dinah: And so Becky, for your school, it looks like each advisory will go out and they will collect the sap and the students will walk the sap to the evaporator?

Becky: Yeah. So we have a few collection barrels and they actually, every advisory goes and collects their sap every morning, and then we take data on it. So we take volume and then we actually have every fractometer where we measure sugar content from each tree. And we have some Norway maples and some sugar maples and some red maples. And so we compare and contrast the sugar content and the output from each tree and also based on diameter of trees.

Dinah: That's exciting to be looking at the data and that must be really engaging for students and for teachers to use that data in their lessons. 

Becky: Yeah, that'd be really interesting. This is the first year we collected all that data, and so it'll be really nice to see how it changes year to year.

Dinah: And Mary, your experience might be different because you are in a more urban setting and so you're using a public park. But what I appreciate about you being here is that this is a thing that can happen. People can use parks or trees in their neighborhood if it's not at their school. So how does that look for you in terms of how students can participate?

Mary: So I have an advisory first thing in the day and they would go out and hang the buckets. And then for my classroom though, we actually were out there in the bitter cold, because it was winter now at this point, we identified the trees. We were measuring the trees out there in the freezing cold that I said, "Put your jackets on, we're going out." And I collected it and recorded all the data of all the sap I collected every day. So I had a running data table in my room of all the sap I collected and then how much syrup I would output on the weekend so that the kids, and then the math teacher had them graph that data for me so that they could see that, oh my God, this was a lot of work to get that much syrup. Because one of the comment was is that from a student, and I'll never forget this because I didn't know what he really was talking about at first. He said, "I only had syrup from the lady in the talking bottle." And I was like, "The lady in the talking bottle?” I had to sit and process it. And I realized that he had never had real maple syrup, he only had Mrs. Buttersworth. And they were super excited. So when we had the English teacher made labels for the bottles, the kids took the bottles with them. It was just really good to see because it's a city school and then an inner city school that's multicultural. So I have kids coming from different countries, et cetera. And we're a big school. There's 1,200 of us in that school. And I didn't have a single issue with anything in the park or anything else, so I was really lucky.

Dinah: So one of the biggest lessons then that one of your students learned was actually where maple syrup comes from.

Mary: Yeah. So when I had pre-tested, I gave them a pre-test about maple and I realized that a lot of them had no idea about maple syrup. They just thought it was the stuff that's in your refrigerator at home. It was nice to see that they could make and then go out there and they could actually then look at the tree and realize that. And then they were funny because at the end they were like, "This came right from across the street." I was like, "Yes."

Dinah: And Mary, you had another teacher who has an evaporator boil it down for you? 

Mary:  No. Oh no. I was a labor of love with the wonderful person I'm married to.

Dinah: So how did you do it? You brought it from the park home?

Mary: So I have a 30 gallon food grade bucket that has a cover. I would bring home the sap every day, put it in there, leave it cold, and I wouldn't be able to cook till the weekend. And then propane tanks and a turkey fryer. I was cooking sap and some nights it was dark and we were cooking and outside.

Dinah: This shows your real dedication, Mary, to this project.

Mary: It was fun. And it was fun for the actually turned into fun too, because I would take video and let the kids see it look in the process, and I'll obviously make changes for next year.

Dinah: What are some changes you think you'll make for next year?

Mary: Now, a lot of it I'll boil down till just before it gets to syrup and bring it back to school to finish where I was hesitant about doing it this year because I was so green and I was like, oh, I don't know if I should do it this way. I don't know if I should stop. I should just finish it from the go. But now bring it back so then the kids can see the filtering process and everything else. So that would be better.

Dinah:  Becky, what are some of the biggest lessons that you think students learn from hands-on maple sugaring beyond just making syrup?

Becky: Oh, geez. I think a really important lesson is how to follow a process from various beginning stages to ending stages. So you know, starting at the very beginning of even going out and identifying trees and measuring trees and then figuring out then tapping the trees and collecting it and then boiling and then how to finish it because we went through all of that with the kids and just how to follow all the steps of the process to get to an end result that was just who doesn't like maple syrup. And also it's a great way to get the kids outside at the end of a long winter when they've kind of been stuck inside and it helped them work toward a common goal. And talk about outdoor agroforestry education. It doesn't get any better than maple syrup making. And especially for the kids who maybe are not your traditional learners who have a lot of energy or just like to be outside or like to be working with their hands, having a hard time sitting still, we found that actually behaviors went down. Our records show that behavioral issues went down during a maple syrup time because the kids were involved in this project and they were outside a lot.

Dinah:  That's really interesting data for your whole school to have around project-based learning and movement and collaboration. Does it take a lot of collaboration for students in general?

Becky: Oh, it's incredible. Yeah. So I can talk about this more later, but we did a whole school maple celebration of learning. So every single teacher and every single student in the school was involved in this. And we had it one night at school, we had the evaporator going and every single teacher was involved with their classes. So there were tons of projects about maple syrup and everybody collaborated with everybody, everybody pitched in, and it was really, really fun to see the entire school to come together for a common purpose.

Dinah: Do you have a favorite memory or story from a maple sugaring season? This isn't your first season, but what stands out to you as maybe…

Becky: Okay, it was definitely this season, and it actually has to do with a former student. I had this former student, his name is Charlie. He's not going to mind that I'm talking about him. And I had him as a student during COVID, so about five years ago. He was the most squirrely kid and had to be constantly moving, constantly was getting himself in trouble just because he just wouldn't sit still and just do his work. And his grandfather owns a Sugar Shack, and his grandfather came to help us boil. We had a lot of volunteers. His grandfather came to help us boil and he said Charlie was really hesitant to come because he knows what the teachers here though of him. I'm like, Charlie should definitely come and help us boil because we all like Charlie. He just had a ton of energy. And he actually came back three times and volunteered with us and helped us boil. And the kids came out and he would explain the process and the degrees and the bricks level. And having him there in a leadership role, it was just amazing. That was my favorite part about anything I've done with maple syrup.

Dinah: Mary, what about you? Do you have a favorite memory or story from working with your students in this way?

Mary: Well, I think overall, I think it was good for the kids to be able to see that you can really accomplish anything you really want to as long as you put your mind to it because they knew that I was out of my depth. I mean, I'm a very project-based class anyway, so my classroom is really always moving. The kids are working in groups. So that wasn't really new to them, but I was like, okay, I have no idea really what I'm doing and let's see what happens. And they were like, okay. But I think it was the fact that I think you can teach them that anything's possible.

Dinah: Mary, I love that you allowed them to see this is also new for me and I'm learning with you.

Mary: Oh, I told them, I said, I am way out of my depth. I said, I am a city girl through and through. I am from Massachusetts. I don't tap trees. I never made syrup. I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Dinah: So they got to see the success that you all experienced.

Mary: Right. Yeah. And it was so fun to see them at the end because the other teachers on my team all cooked breakfast. They were like, no, no, no, you did all the hard work. We're done. You will cook. So they cooked for them and served them, and it was just nice to have that. And the kids really, and so many kids just were like, thank you so much because this was so much fun.

Dinah: So Mary, you had a big breakfast. 

Mary: That they cooked in my classroom. 

Dinah: And Becky, you were sharing that you have had an all school event. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? 

Becky: Sure. So we've had a tradition that went to the wayside during COVID. It's called a celebration of learning, and we always chose a topic and then every class got involved with something surrounding that topic. And so when the evaporator became a reality, I floated the idea of having a maple celebration of learning. And so we had an entire school maple celebration of learning. Every teacher was involved. We invited the community. We had the newspaper there in which we didn't even know they were coming. And we had 350. We have a little over 200 students. We had 350 people come through for the maple celebration of learning that night, which was double. We didn't print enough programs. We didn't make enough maple popcorn to hand out. It was so much more than we expected. And it was just talk about a culmination of a project. It was just incredible. And we had raffles and we had the boiler going. Charlie was there boiling with his grandfather. The kids were coming out, showing their parents their trees that they got their sap from. And it was a great community event for sure.

Dinah: So this sounds like beautiful work and it also sounds like a lot of work. So I would be curious if you could both talk a little bit about the challenges that you've faced and how you had to overcome them.

Mary: Well, I guess a lot of the challenge is that I'm a science teacher, so I'm trying to get in, really trying to fit all of this in and teach back-to-back classes because I'm going outside, we're doing trees, I'm bringing the class back in. And the fact that I was doing it at home, I knew I had to sacrifice that time, which that was something that I chose to do because a lot of people were like, "You're crazy. That's a lot of time and a lot of effort for that little bit of syrup." I'm like, "Yeah, but it's so worth it." And I just think those are some of the challenges of my day-to-day, the fact that I have to be cautious of making sure the buckets are taken in every night and nobody's doing anything to them, et cetera.

Becky: And for me, there were so many challenges to overcome this year. When it was just me collecting 10 buckets with my own classes, it was one thing. But then now we had an evaporator. It wasn't put together, and so I had to find a fabricator to put together the evaporator for us. And I found somebody who was kind of a family friend of ours, and he's like, "Oh, I'll put it together for you." I'm like, "Okay, I'll see if I can find some grant money." He's like, "No, I'll just do it for free." And he welded it together and added a few details that made it more stable, and so that was good. So then we added an evaporator, and then we didn't have enough buckets, and because we only had 10, and now we had the entire school involved. And my dad actually had recently moved from Connecticut to Michigan to a property without maple trees, and so he donated all of his maple equipment to us.

So all of a sudden we had more buckets and taps than we needed. In fact, I was able to let kids borrow something to take home to tap their own trees, and I had several kids take me up on that, and they tapped it home too. And then we had so much sap that I knew we weren't going to be able to boil it down at school, and so I really wanted a reverse osmosis machine, which helps to concentrate the sap, and so you don't have to boil nearly as much. And they're about the hobby one that we wanted was about $500, and I had a foundation, an educational foundation step up and say, "Oh, we'll buy one for you." But then I had no idea how to use it. And so the head electrician would come through maybe once a week, and every time he walked through, I'm like, "Can you come and help me with this?" And he'd come through and help me figure out where all the hoses go.

And so there was just so much of a learning curve doing it on this scale, but I've learned that just ask people because we got the buckets for free, we got the evaporator for free, we got the fabrication of the evaporator for free, and then we got the reverse osmosis for free just because I asked. And there are people who are out there who are so into maple and so excited about maple being taught in schools that they're just willing to donate and also donate their time. I couldn't boil during the day because I had to teach classes. I had local sugar makers come and help boil, and also grandparents of students came in to boil. I had teachers sign up for time slots to be boiling. I had two people donate wood, so we had plenty of wood because we have a wood fired evaporator.

We had plenty of wood for the season, and they just dropped it off at school. I got there one morning and there was a gigantic stack of wood for us because somebody just donated it because they heard we were boiling. So every obstacle we came to, I found people to help us overcome it.

Dinah: Becky, I have a question around safety. There's obviously you were using fire, wood fire. Was there anything you had to do to make any administration or community feel safe about you having fire, open fire and evaporator on the school property? And how did you deal with that? 

Becky: Yes. At first, there were some people who were hesitant about us having it, but luckily I talked to the fire chief and he is a hobbyist maple sugar maker, sorry, maple syrup producer. And so he gave us how far we had to be away from the building and how far he wanted the kids away from the evaporator. And so we actually didn't have the kids put the wood in the evaporator. We'd have the adults do it and we'd just let them come out in small groups and stand around it. So there's definitely a perimeter we'd allow them to stand around it, but definitely close enough to be able to see what's going on. So yeah, there were some safety protocols that we followed for sure.

Dinah: What advice would you give to other teachers who are interested in starting a maple sugaring program at their school so that they could either get their feet wet, like Mary, you had shared that you had never done it, or maybe they're skilled like you, Becky, and they did it when they were young, but they want to start it. What should they do?

Mary: I think I probably would reach out to, I don't know, New Hampshire, we have the ag in the classroom where it has the maple program too. I would start asking the people who do it and say, "Hey, listen, what should I do?" Or just tell people to just try it, go small, start small. If it works, then add to it. I mean, I guess you just have to want to do it and any questions that people should have, they should just find the resources because there's always somebody that's willing to help. And I find in this program with maple, there's a large community of maple people that are always willing to help if you ask them. And I have to agree with Becky that there's people out there that will help you.

Becky: And same thing, I would say to start small. We only had 10 taps to begin with, and it was just me boiling down on my old Coleman stove, and it works fine. It makes maple syrup. It may not be as efficient as the evaporator we have now, but it worked, and we had product, and we made pancakes, and we had maple syrup on them. And yeah, also, people are so willing to help. The maple syrup people love talking about maple syrup, and so you will get more help than you want at times. I had to be like, "Well, you can volunteer this day, but we have somebody else for this time just to start small, and it can be done on a small scale." I even know a teacher who does it inside his classroom with a hood vent. 

Dinah: So when you say start small, start with a few trees, study trees, understand the process, tap those trees, make enough for a tiny breakfast? 

Becky: Yes, or even, I mean, there's some teachers I know of who have made a few cups and it's been a lesson that they just taught for a week. That has value. It has a huge value just going through the process. And then if it becomes something you really want to jump in with both feet, you can. You can go as big as you want. There are schools in New Hampshire that have sugar houses. My school is actually, I have a meeting with the superintendent next week. The Lions Club wants to help us to build a sugar house on our campus. And so there's a lot of hoops to jump through, but it's possibility that we could also have a sugar house on campus.

Mary: I think showing the kids the process is a great thing to realize that you're looking at something that they're looking at every day that they probably didn't realize that it produced that, that it was a maple tree to start with. I mean, I'll tell you right now, my kids did not know they were maple trees. I said, "You've looked at those trees every year now for three years, but they're maple trees." And the fact that they got the sap out of them and that you could see how the whole process worked, and then they could realize that, oh my God, that takes an awful lot of sap to make that little bit of syrup, and the process to go through it and how you're measuring sugar content level and you're making sure that you're right and you're not overcooking. So then I tell the kids, "If you wanted to make candy, what would we do?" So they understood how I could extend the process.

Becky: Yeah. My other suggestion is walk out to the schoolyard while the leaves are on the trees, because you can identify maple trees with opposite branching and all that while there's no leaves on, but it's much more pleasant to be able to identify the maple trees if there's leaves on them. 

Mary: And it's warmer. It’s warmer. 

Becky: And it's warmer. It's warmer, right? And you can tell the difference between a sugar maple and a red maple, which a sugar maple has a lot more. The sugar content is a lot higher, so you don't need as many gallons to produce the same amount of syrup and all that. But you can tap any maple. If you only have a Norway maple on your campus, you can tap Norway maples. If you can tap red maples, it doesn't matter. Stripe maples, they're all fair game. 

Mary: And that's what I'll do this year. I'll take the kids out early when there's leaves on the trees and we'll identify them and we'll do something with the leaves and I'll do some projects so they'll have the leaves and we'll go forward from there. 

Dinah: Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to share about your process or impact or excitement or anything?

Becky: One thing I will mention is that we did have kids. I mean, the whole point of this is to help teach agriculture in a different way. And we did have students tap trees at home and we had some students donate their sap to us. They had so much at home, they couldn't boil it down, and they donate to us for us to throw into our RO machine with our sap. So that was really, really neat seeing parents get involved and donating back their extra. So that was super fun.

Mary: Yeah. And I think this year what I'll do is I think I'll have a student, I'll put out it as a contest for the students to design the label for the bottle, and I'll start earlier and I'll finish at school. And I don't know, I just think people, we have to get these kids out and moving and doing something. And if I can just walk across the street in a pretty beautiful park, because it really is, and the kids can see that I can just get sap right from there and we can make syrup, I think that's fine.

Dinah: You had mentioned that you're in a collective. How would people get involved in that?

Becky: So actually the maple cohort is no more. It was a federal grant and they don't have it for next year. So actually Mary and I are both involved in a different one on agroforestry, which they will run next year. And Maple is a part of that. New Hampshire Agriculture in the Classroom, which is the head of it is Mike Smith. Mike Smith is an incredible resource for anything you want to do in your classroom that's agriculture based. And he has a way of finding things that you need or having people that he knows that you should talk to about this. So the larger group now is called New Hampshire Grows. And so that's the umbrella of all the maple and agroforestry now.

Dinah: Great. So fantastic. So anyone who's listening who teaches in New Hampshire should look for New Hampshire Grows, and anyone who is in another state should find the agricultural resource in their state or reach out, as you said, Mary, to people who do maple sugaring and start there. 

Well, thank you both so much for talking to me today, and I wish you a great start of the year and definitely have the students find those maples this fall and enjoy those leaves.

Mary: Yes.

Becky: Thank you so much for having us. 

Mary: Yes. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Dinah: This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or Farm to School in the Northeast, go to northeastfarmtoschool.org.