Adventure, Teaching

Fish Sticks and Concrete: An Update from the Ag Shop

I’ve discovered that even though I can stay engaged at an all-day seminar full of talking and presentations as long as I have a notebook and pen, I hate teaching like that. I just don’t like talking all day. I’ve had a few days where I talk in all four of my morning classes, and I’m zapped by noon. So I’ve started planning better so I do less of that.

This morning, after presentations given by the high school students, I was asking how things went for them. As they were discussing, I gathered they did not enjoy presenting. One student asked, “How do you teach? How do you stand up there all the time?”

I appreciated the question and was, in a way, touched the student asked me. I thought, “I have no idea some days.” Continue reading “Fish Sticks and Concrete: An Update from the Ag Shop”

Adventure, Farm, Home, Teaching, Transitions

Shorts for the New Year

Happy 2016! Here, it has been warm with a couple of days of extreme cold and slick conditions. There’s been only one two-hour delay, and I’ve only had to break the ice on the cattle water tanks once. The first day all winter I had to pull out my Carhartt coveralls was January 11. Weatherbug shows temperatures hovering around freezing this next week with a bit of snow on Wednesday.

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Thursday’s class. Special note: All students in the following convo are male.

Student A: “Why do you still play VHS?”
Student B: “Because most of the videos she has are still VHS.”
Student C: “I still have a VHS.”
Student A: “Wow, do you use it?”
Student C: “Yeah, I watch Winnie the Pooh.”

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Our baritone players were unavailable during the high school homecoming game last night, so I filled in.

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It was a lot of fun, and I sounded a lot better than I did last year when I played for Alumni and Friends Night. That was encouraging. Continue reading “Shorts for the New Year”

Adventure, Character

The Fun, the Crazy and the Touching: Memorable Moments from Substitute Teaching

Singing “Yankee Doodle,” studying the physics of Frisbees and reading stories were just a few memorable moments from substitute teaching this past school year. Throughout my experiences, I posted several statuses about my adventures on Facebook. I’ve wanted to gather them all in one place for a while and have now recorded them all here for a memorable look at my random and crazy brain that manifested itself while substitute teaching.

December 5

First substitute teaching gig today. Here’s to remembering to call myself Miss Brown….

December 12

Wow. Elementary students who are IU fans sure make it known they don’t like your old gold and black winter cap.

December 15

Science and English focus in the elementary today, which meant that I showed a Bill Nye video on atoms and molecules, played the New Periodic Table Song (all of the elements to the tune of “Can-Can”), challenged the students to a game of “Write the Periodic Table Element Symbol on the Board,” talked about Toledo’s water ban this past summer from the algal blooms on Lake Erie and showed a video of the blooms from when I went up to Lake Erie last year. The students especially asked questions when it looked like something might blow up (e.g. Bill Nye demonstrated nitroglycerin…sort of). All of that combined meant that, when I was making a pizza crust tonight and poured vegetable oil at the bottom of a plastic bowl, I wondered, “What would happen if I had a match? Would the vegetable oil explode?”

(One commenter said, “Only if it’s…Vegetable…Oil…of SCIENCE!”)
Continue reading “The Fun, the Crazy and the Touching: Memorable Moments from Substitute Teaching”