Week 11: A Quick Week & Sweet Professional Development @ Shady Maple

The weeks are continuing to fly by. 

I have been teaching the full load of classes for a little while now but on Monday I had the gang all to myself as Mrs. D was out for the day. The students took some advantage of that, hiding in the shop when I didn't know they were there and we had one instance of students damaging another's project, but luckily it was all fixed and the students were back to getting along by the end of the day. 

Tuesday was another day out of the classroom as we had the chance to take four of our girls to the Area Public Speaking Career Development Event. We had students competing in the Sr. Prepared and Conservation speaking contests while Mrs. D and I, along with the other ag. teachers served as judges for the other contests. I got the chance to judge the Extemporaneous Speaking CDE where the students draw three topics, then choose one of those three to prepare a 6-8 minute speech with only 30-minutes preparation time. The topics can cover anything within the realm of agriculture and that day I got to hear about alternative energy, sustainability, urban agriculture, and biotechnology. For me this was a great experience as I not only got interact with other ag. teachers but also had the chance to listen to students and get a sense of what they are learning in their ag. programs, learning something new about agriculture with every speaker I judged. 

Wednesday and Thursday were normal days of teaching. My Ag. Science I 9th graders were finally all moving into the shop after completing all their safety tests and were now moving onto constructing their too-box projects, teaching me the important lesson of having eyes in the back of your head - especially when you have 16 students all use power tools and stationary machinery at once in the wood-shop. Yikes!

In addition to teaching, Wednesday night also made for a sweet reunion with several of my fellow student teachers for some professional development. That night was our areas's New & Beginning Teacher Workshop, a professional development opportunity offered by Penn State. Gathering together at the Shady Maple Smorgasbord in Lancaster, it was a night of sharing resources, and stories, and collaborating together to learn how to improve each of our individual programs while also forming contacts and connecting the newer generations of teachers with experienced teachers, all while over a delicious meal. I know that I walked away with several valuable resources, both digital and physical, and formed better connections with teachers. 

This was also another opportunity for me to get to interact with the newest ag. teacher in the area from Pine Grove. Pine Grove is one of the closest ag. programs to Tri-Valley and had just hired a new ag. teacher right before I began student teaching. As her closest neighbors, she has interacted with Mrs. D quite often, which allowed me to work with her as well and I think adds a nice element to my student teaching experience. The new teacher is originally from a more biology-focused background and is still learning about the wonderful world of FFA, so interacting with her has been greatly beneficial for me as she is able to trade notes with me on her teacher preparation program and her classroom teaching strategies while I, along with Mrs. D, am able to teach her about FFA and about the diverse possibilities within ag. education.

Overall, the week wrapped up nicely with another Friday back at Penn State for a day of mock interviews and peer review of lessons. Can't believe it's only a few weeks left!

Week 10: #SLLC15 & Full Load of Classes

This week was crazy busy!

My week actually started bright and early Sunday morning as Mrs. D and I took a group of four great girls down to Harrisburg for the three-day State Legislative Leadership Conference (SLLC). During this conference the students attend leadership workshops focused on developing them as aware and active citizens and teaching them about the legislative process. The students are even split up into the House and Senate and go through mock reviewing of current bills relevant to them, including safety features of school buses, hunting regulations, and standardized testing. This provides the students the chance to learn about the process and see how and why it takes so long for certain regulations to go into effect, giving them a greater appreciation of the process.

The students weren't the only ones in workshops developing themselves - teachers were too. The first day at the conference was spent reviewing and grading Proficiency Awards from across the state. As a student who never went through the process of actually completing a Proficiency myself, this was really helpful to se how the applications are put together and how teachers score them. It was also just really exciting to have a chance to "see" the variety of SAE projects across the state from livestock and crop production to agribusiness ventures to research projects.

The next round of professional development involved learning about how to advocate for yourself and your agricultural education program. The culminating piece of the conference is a breakfast meet-and-greet with our representatives at the capital building, so this workshop focused on the reasons advocating is important, the best ways to approach advocating, and how to create simple one-page documents that serve as physical value-added documentation of why someone should support you. Essentially a one-page, front and back handout that uses stats and pictures to show why your individual agricultural education program is awesome.

Once all the workshops were finished we got back together with our kids and enjoyed a wonderful day of community service. Everyone at the conference was split up at various locations to perform community service - we were located a nearby senior living center where we got to enjoy the wonderful weather while outside landscaping. My girls seemed to have a lot of fun and everyone was in high spirits all day. It was a great chance for me to get to interact with some of my younger students who I hadn't had the chance to interact with too much yet, while also allowing me to strengthen the bond with one of my older favorite students.

While I had a great time at SLLC there was the rest of the week to teach! Going back to school to teach the next few days was exhausting as both myself and my students hadn't yet recovered from our trip. The next few days went by without a hitch as I continues to teach a full load of classes. My students and I got to start our weekends a little earlier than normal as a freak snow storm caused us to have an early dismissal on Friday, and while no one wanted winter to return, everyone was very excited to start the weekend.

Week 9: Community Relations

This has been a hectic week to say the least. This was also a week that highlighted community relation and how it supports an agriculture program.

This week we were dissecting in my Ag Science II-IV classes so my week started with a trip to Bixler's meats, the local butcher, to pick up some reproductive and digestive tracts. Even though we were learning about poultry in this class, the butcher didn't handle any birds and I wasn't able to have any of my students bring in any birds (live or dead) due to biosecurity reasons, so instead I was able to get tracts from pigs. I picked up both types of tracts this week but we were only focusing on the digestive tracts this week and I actually think that using the pig tracts instead of birds' actually provided a greater learning opportunity.

My students seemed to enjoy the chance to get their hands dirty cutting apart the dissection tract and while some of them were a little grossed out, most seemed to really enjoy it. For me it gave the opportunity to compare and contrast digestive systems across species with the tracts, reviewing some of the material they had learned in past agriculture classes.



This week was also my first of a few FFA banquets I would be attending this spring. In this area, there are several other FFA chapters within an hour's drive of Tri-Valley so each chapter invites their neighboring chapters to send representatives to their banquets and some other social functions. This week was the Upper Dauphin FFA Banquet and I'll admit that at first I thought it was strange to attend another chapter's banquet. This was not something we ever did at home. Then while attending Upper Dauphin I realized how great of an opportunity this was - through the simple gesture of inviting a few extra guests, the chapters were ensuring a friendly community bond was built amongst the chapters.

I had a great time at the Upper Dauphin FFA Banquet. It was a great chance to see how another chapter performed their banquet and allowed Mrs. D and I the chance to compare ideas and think of ways to improve our own Tri-Valley Banquet coming up in May. One of the highlights we both really enjoyed at Upper Dauphin's was that it was the 60th anniversary of the original FFA chapters in that area, and so one of their officers gave a beautiful presentation on the chapter's history. While not everyone would be able to give a presentation like theirs, I do believe that celebrating your chapter's history is another great way to continue to build the community relations within your own local chapter.

Overall, this has been a great week and a great example of the value of community relations to a chapter's success.

Week 8: Short but Sweet

So this has been another short week (apparently I jinxed myself), with two snow days, two delays, and an early dismissal. This week was my first week with the new classroom set-up; instead of the usual seven separate long tables in rows which used to feel like a maze whenever I would try moving around the classroom, now I have three pods of two tables pushed together, angled in the classroom to (almost) resemble a horseshoe facing my desk, with my seventh table at the front the class pushed agains the board to serve as my materials table.

Everyone's reactions to the new classroom set-up have been pretty amusing, and for the most part positive. When the students arrived Monday morning they were stunned to see change as it appears it's been a very long time since the room has been changed. While there are some mixed reactions, I prefer this new set-up so far, it allows me to move around and interact with all of my students without feeling like I am cut off from others. So far it's also made grouping easier, so now I can have more group work and have easier student discussions without feeling like they are talking over each other.



While we weren't able to get a lot accomplished in the classroom so far this week because of our weather, we did get a chance to work together and accomplish one of the chapter fundraisers and get a sweet taste of summer in the process. A new fundraiser the FFA chapter tried out this year was a strawberry sale. The chapter already has a citrus sale in the fall, but they decided to try it out this year and I think it was a great success! We sold strawberries by the quart, half-flats (4 quarts) and full-flats (8 quarts), and while the strawberries had a long travel from Florida north to us, their taste could have fooled you. They were a hit and we spent our Friday unloading, sorting and checking on quality control while also enjoying the extra strawberries that weren't quite up to snuff to distribute to our customers. It was a really good thing we ordered extras too, because we had teachers calling or running down all day who had gotten a taste of some of them and wished they had bought some.

So its was a sweet day of bonding with the few students I had that day (it was the State Wrestling Event so we had multiple students wrestling and many more students absent to support the wrestlers).