4:50 am, a new routine

4:50 am, a new routine, each morning without an alarm this is when I wake up, typically excited for those last 30 minutes of sleep before I get up for another exciting day of student teaching. Well today was no different, except we had a 2 hour delay and then shortly after this we were closed. My cooperating teacher forwarded me the email sent out from the district superintendent, that went something like this.

Good morning everyone, I am out driving around this morning and the roads are terrible, I can not see the pavement and the cold temperature has made for icy patches under the snow covered roads. Please be careful if you must travel today, but all offices and schools will be closed again today, have a good weekend. Sent from his i-phone.

This week I had the opportunity to interview for another agriculture teacher position, which once again has lead me to evaluating what type of program am I best suited for. I have alway been told that you will know when you have found the right program for you, being a person that does not like to get her hopes up means that I know this is true but I try very hard to not get excited about opportunities until they can be a reality. However, this does not stop me from evaluating what I look for in not only an Ag program but a school environment.

I brought up this email from our superintendent because it is so personable, I imagine him out and about early this morning evaluating the roads before he pulled over and sent out this email so ensure no one had to travel in these terrible conditions. A personable administration is just one more thing that I look for when considering if a program is best for me.

Anyway back to the week of little teaching, as I said Friday was a snow day and  Thursday was also a snow day. Wednesday we had a 2 hour delay and I had my interview, with the delay my cooperating teacher advised me to stay home and prepare for my interview and hey when the boss says stay home and prepare you stay home.

This left only Monday and Tuesday for teaching…

Monday we began with a quiz on IPM and then were to being showing pesticide safety videos. I encountered a great deal of frustration Monday with this class. Prior to the quiz I asked if there were any questions about the steps of IPM or the control methods, the class reply was blank looks and no questions. However, the moment I pulled out the quiz and laid the first one down 5 hands shot up with questions, like they thought before that I was just kidding about their being a quiz.

After this we were going to watch our first pesticide video, the problem was I only had 2 quizzes from 8 groups, as I asked who was ready to present today came a wave of excuses. Now my expectation is that we can always make exceptions if you communicate with me, which several groups had done the week before. However, their is no excuse for not meeting a deadline when I had given multiple work days for this project. I know and respect that my students have a lot going on outside of class and after school which makes group projects difficult to complete without class time, which is why I will always push a deadline of things came up and I was not able to provide them with sufficient time, but this was not the case.

At this point I laid down the law that everything was due by Wednesday or points would be deducted. This one class session had me thinking back to the expectations that were communicated for this entire project, did I go astray at some point with my expectations, but I do not think so. I provided the students with a rubric, a project description and overview, I communicated the deadlines several times, and laid out the framework of in class time to complete this project, what else could I have done?

The rest of Monday continued with some more small gas engines, talking about the events of ignition as well as working in the shop to remove more external parts. Then in AFNR we finished up our previous activity and went through the final paragraph of The FFA Creed before moving on to applying the concepts of ph determining who killed members of the petunia family on Tuesday

Overall this week there were some challenges but there were some highlights that as always make it worth it. We had our chapter creed contest Wednesday night which I got to help judge, as always it is a powerful moment to hear these freshman students say The FFA Creed and attempt to explain its significance. The Creed is particularly important to me , as I know it was where I began my public speaking career and pushed myself to continue even after placing 4th of of 4 at our county contest. Needless to say I was not a great Creed speaker but I was pushed and continued forward with public speaking, something that I am extremely thankful for to this day.

It was another week of firsts, moments, reflection, and learning, I wonder what next week will hold?

Till next time...