Balancing Personal Excitement to What Makes the Students Excited
The realization 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 about the same amount who have any dairy cow experience. So, all the information I was trying to teach them they had little interest in, a very small personal connection to work with other than them enjoying ice cream, and we had a lot to try to instill in them. This was pretty discouraging to me in the beginning as I was super excited for this unit but I decided we would make the best of it! This is also my biggest, chattiest, rowdiest, class. Overall, I feel like this week did go well though even with these challenges. I gave them a variety of worksheets to learn the terminology and we used a lot of the Hoards judging classes from past years. We watched a few videos on how to actually give appropriate, good sets of reasons. I could have changed this lesson by having the students watch videos to judge from, but I felt like in a class this rowdy they would chat throughout the whole videos and not truly focus. Next time I teach this lesson, I think I will try to incorporate videos to see how the students do handle them.
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 about the same amount who have any dairy cow experience. So, all the information I was trying to teach them they had little interest in, a very small personal connection to work with other than them enjoying ice cream, and we had a lot to try to instill in them. This was pretty discouraging to me in the beginning as I was super excited for this unit but I decided we would make the best of it! This is also my biggest, chattiest, rowdiest, class. Overall, I feel like this week did go well though even with these challenges. I gave them a variety of worksheets to learn the terminology and we used a lot of the Hoards judging classes from past years. We watched a few videos on how to actually give appropriate, good sets of reasons. I could have changed this lesson by having the students watch videos to judge from, but I felt like in a class this rowdy they would chat throughout the whole videos and not truly focus. Next time I teach this lesson, I think I will try to incorporate videos to see how the students do handle them.
Brooke,
ReplyDeletePlease be sure to think about incorporating pictures into your blogs as a picture truly does tell a 1000 words.
Also, frame the question that you really want feedback on and be sure to share (ie email) with your mentor team...they are waiting for you to ask questions to them to help!
I would also encourage you to be cautious of over-generalizing.
ReplyDeleteSs sometimes share what they think is "cool" for why they take a class, usually, they are just waiting for someone to help flip the switch to see the connections and values.