The Life Work Balance Struggle

I am about to embark on my second year of teaching and I keep thinking about how this year will be different. For those of you reading this blog that do not know me I am  in no uncertain terms a workaholic. Call me, text me, email me, and I typically respond within a few hours even on weekends. I always have an electronic device on me to stay connected with work and I have issues with never saying no or asking for help. I struggle with the life work balance, yes I was warned about it, yes I even sat through classes geared towards finding this balance and its importance and yes I still feel prey to not enough balance my first year of teaching. So what should I have known?

1. Always make time for your family, call, text, email, and see them in person even if its only for a day its worth the drive and the time.

2. Make sure your significant  other really gets it, otherwise they will not be happy when you can't leave work at work

3. You run your life on a schedule as a teacher, so schedule in the things you love to do or the goals you have, for me this includes going to the gym and finding time for my hobbies. Say sorry we can't have practice at 6:00 I have another appointment, lets shoot for 5:00.

4. Build a support network, it can be hard moving to a new town but put yourself out there and don't be afraid to initiate new friendships, yes these people have known each other since they were in diapers, yes it will be awkward, yes they may not want to be your snapchat friend, but you don't want to get to the end of year one and realize you haven't built your social network.

Year two will be different, will I still be a workaholic, I have not doubt, but I will keep these four tips in mind to help with the balance because I love being an Ag Teacher but I am more than just an Ag Teacher.

Till the next to I am compelled to blog about my thoughts...

Spring CDE Buzz

Well hello there blog… its been a little bit. Okay its been since I started this amazing teaching job. So heres what has inspired me to blog on this Thursday evening. Today was our Spring CDE competition where our chapter had both a Floriculture and an Ag Mechanics team.

Heres a little secret... I know little to nothing about flowers ( I am trying to learn) and  I could comfortably teach an Intro to Ag Mechanics class but thats about as far as my knowledge of these two subject areas goes. Of course I have amazing students that wanted to compete in these areas so I did what any one in my situation would do, I started calling around for favors.

This works particularly well when your  new and have that terrified new teacher voice going on. Anyway did I ever luck out... my co-advisor who is a floral rockstar agreed to coach the floriculture team… thank goodness.

Next was to tackle who would coach Ag Mechanics, luckily one of  the interested students said hey I know guy who has some tractors and he might do it. As a new teacher that was all I needed, so I made a phone call. Much to my surprise he said sure no problem and even volunteered his buddy to help out.

So we have been practicing since February 1-2 times a week and today was the day, the ultimate test...

Now don't get me wrong I love to win, but winning doesn't motivate me like the 3 observations I made today.

I returned to the bus today to get a debriefing from my Ag Mechanics coach on how the completion went and here is one of the first things he told me.

The boys did great and they took the competition seriously and were arguable the best composed team there….

    That makes me proud, because I know that I have empowered my students  to behave in a manner consistent with the values I am trying to instill in them each day. My students know how a Woodstown FFA member should conduct themselves.

The second observation I made was a student who was shy and reserved when I first met him 8 short months ago, a student who today was joking and conversing with teammates and students from other schools.

At that point I really did not care how well they placed because I knew they had gained skills that would take them to great heights… even if they don't know it yet themselves.

Lastly I watched as our Floriculture group message unfolded upon the sharing of results, with team members congratulating each other and being understanding and compassionate when a score didn't turn out quite as good as expected.

I know your all dying to know how the teams did, did the coach led them astray, is she blinding  us with  all these positives because her teams failed…

Overall both teams took 3rd place, both teams were comprised of new members who's first time competing in these competitions was today.


Today I was an extremely proud FFA Advisor, today I saw once again the impact that FFA can have on students. Today was nothing short of a great day.

Two weeks in… a lifetime to go

I am officially two weeks into my teaching career and what a two weeks it has been. In just these two weeks life has gone from hectic to so fast paced I have to remember to stop and take a breath, this lifestyle has not left nearly enough time for reflection on the art of teaching.

 

I am teaching 5 different classes which at this point are going well, I mean I have shown up every day and and content has been taught. I keep saying to myself I will make that a little better a little more engaging and little more exciting, but then I find more pressing issues that override these thoughts. I keep jotting notes for next year as I know there will come a time when there is more time. People have always told me that year one is about keeping your head above water and that sure is the case. I have decided to pick one class as a time to start getting to those items with. 

The monster I have chosen to tackle is Ag Business, a class filled with the ever unmotivated seniors and a subject that none of us are overly found of. However it is my job to find a way to engage them in the content. Over the past two weeks we have waded through the content with e-moments, group work, and discussions but it hasn't hit home yet.  So I began Thursdays class  with asking them what they wanted from the course.  As a student it wasn't until my junior and senior years of college that a professor or teacher ever asked me what I wanted to learn. I showed up the first day and they just told us this was our year. So what does my senior group want out of a class?

They want discussions instead of lectures, they want to teach, they want videos, and they want group projects, they want simulations, and if possible they want to do nothing. Now its up to me to discover how to modify the content into these forms and meet at least a few of their requests. I told them they would have to work with me, that I couldn't transform the class over night but I would do my best to incorporate more of there wants into the plans. We will see how this goes, I don't expect these students to come out of my class and all want to go to major in agri-business, but I hope they will have a greater appreciation for what agribusiness really is.

Well I suppose I should get to lesson planning for the week.

Till next time...

When did I become an Ag Teacher?

It's a strange feeling knowing that I am no longer a college student, instead of being worried about the assignments and textbooks I'm worried about what will I teach, how my classroom should be arranged,
and  what will my students learn.

 It's funny looking back at that quite country girl that started at Penn State four short years ago. When did I become so opinionated, open minded, and passionate about the profession. It was somewhere between badminton class, Korea, Foster moments, late nights and student teaching. Somewhere around figuring out where I wanted to start in the profession and not being afraid to move away from home.

People keep asking me why New Jersey, why would you ever wanna go there? I simply tell them it was the place for me. It's a feeing that I get when I drive through town or walk into the high school, a sense of belonging. It was the job that was going to hurt like hell if it wasn't mine, and for now thats enough for me to be here.

There are so many things to be terrified about in this upcoming year, but weather I belong in this profession or if I made the right choice for the start of my career is not one of them.

I hope when I look back at this in a year or five that I will still be bursting with passion, new ideas, and that star gazed new teacher look. I may never change the world or the profession but for now I plant to continue to believe I can.

Now I'm not naive, I know this first year will be hard, something to be terrified of actually, but its only 180 days. 180 days for me to give it my all and see what I'm made of and I know I'm not going against it alone.

As I like to say this year will be the beginning to the next 30 years of my life, lets see where it takes me.


Till next time...

If finally happened, they said I had to leave.

If finally happened, they said I had to leave. I am no longer Ms. Miller the student teacher at Penn Manor, I am now Ms. Miller soon to be Penn State Alumni.

As I look back on the journey that I have had over these past 15 weeks I can't imagine having a better experience. From day one I was welcomed into the Ag program as one of the teachers and began building rapport with my students. I started out timid in front of the classroom, just hoping that my students wouldn't ask questions that I could not answer. I was intimidated by the material and the challenges that would lye ahead but pushed forward knowing that I would grow with my students this semester.

So what have I learned this semester, how I have I changed, what philosophies have wavered with my experience.

Where to begin, the biggest thing I learned this semester was how to me myself in the classroom. All my life I have observed teachers in there classes, I have seen how they interacted with their students and their overall presence. With all of these in mind I painted an image of what I would be like in the classroom… an image that looks quite different at the end of this experience. I have developed routines, expectations that differ from the printed posters, and high standards for my students.

Planning for a class is much easier when you are in the classroom. This past fall I struggled to develop 85 minute lesson plans that would be fun, engaging, or take the full time. Now I blink an eye and 75 of those 85 minutes is gone and I still have an activity I wanted to get to in the day. The challenge was I didn't know my class, I didn't know their pace, interest, or skill level.

As my students said goodbye to me on Friday my last block class went around the room and each one said something about me. What they thought of me, wishing me luck in the future, that they were glad  I was there, or how I helped or impacted them in this class. It was a touching and powerful moment as I realized though small, I did have an impact on these students, but the greatest is the impact that they had on me. I will always remember my first SAE visits, my first day of class, my first unit conclusion, the challenges I faced this past Spring, all moments etched in my mind forever. I had no idea how hard it would be in the end to leave.

What is my nugget of knowledge, what do I want soon to be student teachers to know. We have the opportunity to interact with next years student teachers, what will I tell them about their 15 week experience…

You get out of it what you put in, I had a FANTASTIC experience and I went into it with the disposition that there was no other option. I never left school at the end of the day thinking it wasn't worth it today. It's an experience and its only 15 weeks so make it count!

In my 15 weeks I impacted over 45 students lives and each one of them has changed me as an educator.

The Effects of Co-Teaching on Student Satisfaction

     While student teaching we are tasked with designing and collecting data for an Action Research project. The original thought was to identify a targeted area that was in need of improvement and employ various lessons and activities to positively affect this targeted area. Upon arriving at Penn Manor my cooperating teacher and I had our interest peaked by our ventures of co-teaching the Introduction to Ag Science course.

    With this I began looking for articles that talked about the benefits of co-teaching on both student achievement and student satisfaction. The idea that these two ideas are connected weighs heavily in my teaching philosophies and I was interested to find the research to support this. I found a lot of information about the use of co-teaching in special needs classrooms but little about the use of this teaching strategy in regular education classrooms. With this the development for our action research came to life, looking at the effects of co-teaching on student satisfaction. 

     We decided that the best route for executing this was to design a learner satisfaction form that we would administer to the student as the end of each class period. We selected three methods of teaching and developed an evaluation form based off of several recent co-teaching student in mathematics classrooms. We also worked to design an implementation schedule that would balance the effects of a student teacher versus an experienced teacher and the influences that this may have had on learner satisfaction.  

     As the data came in and we began evaluating the results we concluded that we made the greatest student to teacher contact points when utilizing the co-teaching method of one teacher teaching and the other teacher drifting.
The greatest learner satisfaction was achieved when the co-teaching strategy of team teaching was utilized.

     Unfortunately our study was not able to conclude if learner achievement was increased with learner satisfaction, maybe next time…

     

   

Who needs pesticide credits?

A need identified for the community was and will continue to be pesticide education courses for the attainment of both core and category credits. Another item identified at Penn Manor was the need for both community members and students of the community to earn their private pesticide applicators licenses.

 With this it was decided to transform the community-based unit of instruction both into a resource to utilize and enhance the community but also to aid the Ag Science 3 students, as I tasked them with engaging with the community and preparing to earn their private applicators license.

 

As we went through our IPM and pesticide unit we began contacting local persons within the community and sending out letters to invite the community to our pesticide meeting. The intent was that the students would secure the participants and myself along with the help of another Ag teacher in the department would secure the speakers for the night. We reached out to Penn State Extension, contacts that Mr. Hess had made in the past. They were more than willing to come and support the Agriculture Department, its students, and the community.

     As the meeting date drew closer I identified which students from my class would be able to attend the meeting night. About half of my class, 10 students, would be in attendance. From this point we began identifying tasks for them to complete and talking with the entire class about how we engage the community and showcase the Agriculture program and ourselves.

         This sparked many discussions about how many people typically attended these meetings, and why the number was so high, what was the secret.

 Unfortunately the day of our meeting we had an ice storm and had to cancel so all of the students community engagement and hard work was never put into action. I contacted the speakers who were more than willing to reschedule but did not have any free dates until late April, which would not help the community that needed their credits before the end of March to keep their licenses in date. As we canceled our meeting, within the next few days the phone calls from community members began coming in and the students quickly identified a need for a meeting.

As we redirected this idea due to the timeline, we discovered that the community did not know where to go to find other meeting locations. With this the students spent the next few days researching other meeting locations and how to access them. To aid the community the class designed flyers to hang around the community that went through the process of checking credit numbers and finding meeting locations for all applicators licenses. A group of students then traveled around the community to hang these flyers in pre-identified locations.

     The next step in our unit was preparing for and taking the private applicators exam. We not only offered this exam to our students but to the community, unfortunately no community member showed up the day of the exam, but it was offered.

    To prepare for the private applicators exam I brought in Kelly Lowery from the Penn State Extension to review with the students and make sure they were prepared for the applicators exam. I also worked with Katie Holden , a local Extension Agent to come in and administer the private applicators exam.

As the unit wrapped up we discussed the events that had taken place and identified areas in which we could improve the process and further engage with the community.

        Overall looking back on the unit I wished that I would have been able to engage the community even further with this unit. The key is most certainly planning far enough ahead which was a challenge not being in the community until January.