I wanted to chase. Nobody would teach me.

I was the kid who stood at the screen door when everyone else was told to get to the basement. Not because I was brave. Because I could not look away.

I grew up watching storms come across the plains and wanting, badly, to understand what I was looking at. Not the safety poster version. The real thing: why that cloud was rotating and the one next to it was not, why the sky went that particular shade of green, how anybody could tell what a storm was going to do before it did it.

There was nobody to ask. No club, no mentor, no one in my town who did this. I read what I could find, which in those days was not much, and got most of it wrong. My first years chasing were embarrassing. I drove to the wrong side of storms. I chased things that were never going to produce and missed the ones that did. I learned it the slow way, one wasted tank of gas at a time, because there was no fast way available to me.

Meanwhile I became a teacher. That was not a detour, though it looked like one at the time. Standing in front of a class for years teaches you something you cannot get from knowing a subject: how to tell when a room has stopped following you, and what to do about it. How to explain rotation to a nine-year-old without either lying to them or losing them. How to build something to a standard instead of just to a topic.

Then one spring I brought my own storm footage into my classroom. I had not planned it as anything. I just had video of a supercell I had filmed the week before, and it fit what we were covering.

The room went completely silent, and then it did not stop asking questions for forty minutes.

That was the whole idea, right there. Those kids were not quiet because the video was dramatic. They were quiet because somebody standing in front of them had actually been there, could answer any question they threw at it, and was not reading from a script.

Severe Storms Lab is that lesson, built out properly and taken on the road. I bring the footage I filmed. I bring a vortex you can put your hand through, headsets that put a student underneath a rotating wall cloud, and a camera where a quiet kid discovers they can deliver a forecast in front of a room. And because I spent those years in a classroom, the whole thing is built against grade-level standards, so a teacher giving up a period gets the period back in curriculum value.

Somewhere in every school I visit there is a version of me at ten years old, standing at the screen door. That kid now has somebody to ask.