Hay Bales and Teacher Tales

This was my mid term review week! I was super glad to have this review this week as I confidently feel as if this was my best week yet. My lessons went well all week and we accomplished everything planned but this had a small amount to do with it. When teaching this week, I felt really comfortable with the students. I feel like I finally know them pretty well and this made it easier to relate to them. When you relate and can act more calm around students this overall will help you teach the material better and I really learned this lesson this week! I feel guilty that it took me this long to be comfortable enough with them to be more personable and open but now that I am I have realized they have changed too. I feel like last week they started chatting with me more about everything and they felt better coming to talk to me about things such as grades and just asking general questions about assignments. Mrs. B and I had an opportunity to talk about this during my mid term review and I w...

On Tuesday, I attended Athens Area High School to observe their agriculture program. I was super interested to see an agriculture program with two teachers. The dynamics of this team was awesome to see because Mrs. A is still a decently knew teacher and Mr. S has been teaching for awhile. These two both have strong points that they each get to bring to the program and students. During my day there, I spent time in each of their classrooms seeing how they manage and each teach different classes. I spent much of the day with Mrs. A who teaches intro, 3 sections of biology, and animal science. The highlight of this was seeing how she handles 3 sections of the same class. I thought this could be boring teaching the same thing 3 times in one day but she did change it up some and the classes and atmosphere of each varies greatly. This was the main reason she said it never got boring. I then headed down stairs to observe Mr. S while he taught his shop II and horticulture class. In this clas...

Yesterday I visited and observed the freshman honors biology class. This was a very good day to visit as Mrs. W first needed to give the class a slight lecture about cheating on an exam. I thought she handled this situation very well but differently than I have ever witnessed. Instead of getting angry and accusatory, she told them the consequences of what would happen at a higher level especially as an honors class. Also, she is making them retest. I was impressed by how she took this bad situation but still turned it into a positive teaching moment. Her actual lesson this day was an introduction to carbon molecules. I thought her teaching method for these molecules was really awesome. First she drew it on the board. Then, she had the students make it out of beads with their hands. Lastly, she showed them a picture of it and then they drew it in their notes. She also related everything to  real life situations that they could connect too. I also enjoyed how she made her classes v...

On Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend a field trip to Penn College. I attended this trip with the agriculture mechanics department. We took 44 boys on this adventure. Overall, this trip was great! Penn College did an incredible job of showing the programs they offer and bringing it industry and career representatives. This trip gave me a lot of ideas on how to organize field trips and also demonstrated that taking a large group of kids outside of school can be difficult and scary! The trip had a bit of a rough start. I realized that even bus drivers make a difference. As a teacher, I believe having connections is essential. Getting to know the bus drivers and which are great to take along on trips can be a very important part of successfully getting the kids on time and to the correct location. For this trip  we only took one bus and it was completely packed. We did have a few boys that we did have to force to sit three in a sit which was rough. If a sassy bus driver, over...

On Tuesday, we traveled to Liberty for the dairy judging cde. I was very excited to take students on this trip as in high school it was my favorite cde to compete in and loved a day out of school in the barn. Another lesson like last week, this is not what most of my students considered fun. They went and were well behaved and did seem to try hard though! This was very rewarding as I did feel trying to teach this information in such a short amount of was so difficult and I was so worried about how well they actually caught on. During the competition, I was able to see my students really trying to use their knowledge and I was so surprised and happy about the questions they were asking me.  One of my favorite moments was, one of my students who has never been around livestock was having a very hard time with the smell. He actually spent all day covering his nose with his shirt. As we arrived at the second farm he was refusing to get off the bus. As his peers headed int...

The r ealization of being an agriculture teacher swept me away this week! The fact that some people do only take ag classes for science credit or they have no other options and get put there. They take these classes for these reasons instead of having a burning passion and desire for agriculture topics.  This week in my animal science 1 class, we were learning about dairy judging. This was a unit I was most excited for teaching. I feel the most confident with this material and have the most experience with it. When I found out I only had one week to teach dairy judging that was so upsetting to me! There were so many fun activities I realized just could not fit in if we were going to have these students prepared for the judging competition next week. This was super eye opening experience for me as a teacher. We need to make sure we are only teaching the important ideas and staying on track is super important. I also quickly realized I had basically no students who enjoy cows and a...