Scott Jordan’s Fisheries and Wildlife Technologies class at Cuba-Rushford High School in upstate New York uses woods, ponds, and nature facilities as its lab. I am sitting in the back of his classroom watching him teach his students the Latin name of the whitetail deer, why black locust was used for the deer facility fence posts, and which government agencies oversee which kinds of projects. At one point he sees a student with a phone and calls out “Float Test!” – a reference to a time when he unceremoniously swiped a phone and plopped it into the classroom aquarium. Now, the threat is enough. “I hate those things,” he tells me later. “They are giving our kids the attention span of a goldfish – three to eight seconds.” But attention span does not seem to be a problem now. When the class ends, I check my watch to see if it was really a full period.

An inspired high-school science teacher and his students raise deer and fish on the school grounds.