I am a maternity leave teacher. I teach high school agriculture classes to nearly 100 students.
Ag for Dummies Hint #1: Pigs don't sweat.
Ag for Dummies Hint #2: Maternity leave teachers do.
A neat history lesson, poetic embellishment free of charge: When FFA was founded in 1928, a high school agriculture class might have begun at sunrise in a broad field, in a stable, or out in the mud by the pond behind the patched-up wooden barn. Ten string-bean boys would have circled around their teacher, a farmer himself, and dug their hands deep into the fertile earth. And they would have become practical farmers working a family farm—it was expected, and it was just fine.
Ag for Dummies Hint #3: Today most ag classes take place either in a classroom or online.
Ag for Dummies Hint #4: Online courses are great for inexperienced teachers needing that quick brush-up/crash course.
I enter the scene here. I am not a farmer, nor an ag expert in any sense of the term. Once upon a time not too long ago I taught poetry and plays--Greek plays. Strangely, this is now where I am and will remain (hopefully) until the first week of June. This blog is the record of trials and errors of an English teacher's approach to teaching agriculture, which is the only way I can approach it. We all must move from where we've first taken root, no?
Bingo. As timeless as a rocking chair, and about as exciting. I tried my own version of bingo on the first day of class in order to get to know the students in my classes. The game provided juicy bits of personal information about my students, like which students have wrestled a goat, which have seen an animal give birth, and which can name the last three presidents (fewer students than you might guess). I wanted to start building my database of who my students are, probably the most important lesson I could learn in the first week.
Bingo worked, and so did the nature hike. When I discovered the computer in my office had no printing capabilities, and thus needed to scrap most of my first day lesson plans, a hike down the school's nature trail seemed a perfect fix, especially on the first day back from spring break. The hike taught me that while I may know my presidents better than the average student in my classes, the average student in my classes knows a heck of a lot more about finding, cooking, and selling mushrooms than I do. In half an hour one young man made $30 off the mushrooms he found a split second before I did.
I have found myself teaching about pigs. Which means I am learning about pigs. Simultaneously, in fact. Together my students and I have discovered, for instance, the ins and outs of docking tails, clipping needle teeth, notching ears, and castrating newborn piglets by hand. I also saw the inside of a student's stomach...after she hurled. (Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe will get ya every time.)
In other news, euthanasia is always a touchy subject when it comes up in a class of 20 sixteen year-olds. After I had the students write about their most memorable experiences with pets, I pioneered a discussion on what it means to put those pets to sleep.
Ag for Dummies Hint #5: When you start a discussion on killing dogs and cats, there is a good chance you'll start the kind of argument and subsequent adolescent meltdown nightmares are made of.
Fortunately this did not happen. While the ethics of euthanasia and animal overpopulation are quite personal, a good group of students is more than capable of having a mature conversation about them. I was tempted to argue the students away from their youthful idealism, but thought better of it. I wince at the thought of had I not... After hypothetically euthanizing each of my students' pets, I nearly did kill the approximately 100 bass and bluegill growing under my care. Did I mention I have a fish tank in my classroom? Actually, a small swimming pool, and it's in the greenhouse connected to my classroom. If the tank either overflows or drains, all the fish will die. So far I have narrowly avoided the former; if/when the latter happens, it could very well be a different story. Since these catastrophes are unlikely to happen regularly, I've found I'm quite adept at killing fish on the sly, one or two everyday. I'll get the lot of them by the end, I'm sure.
On a different note, I have installed artificial turf in my office. The hope was to reinforce my "country" image--you know, that same image I shredded and burned, and whose ashes I fed to the 100 bluegill hopefully not dying in the tank behind my classroom, when I admitted I only listen to country music when I'm driving with my beautiful fiance. Yes, that's the image the artificial turf is meant to amend.
