Growing the Extra Mile

As future educators, it is important that we use our student teaching time to explore what we want our future programs to look like. In order to do this, it is important that we get exposure to as many other programs as possible. During my time student teaching, I thought that a good way to experience other agriculture programs would be to visit another student teacher. This week, I decided to visit Emily McGowan at TriValley who is student teaching under Ms.Gretchen Dingman.  TriValley is a rather small school district in Valley View, PA that has a very active and growing agriculture program. they are currently a single teacher program, however, they have gained so much interest within the school that they are looking to add another teacher so that they can offer more agriculture classes to more students. Currently, they offer the following classes: Agricultural Sciences & Mechanics I Agricultural Science II, III, & IV Agricultural Practicum II, III, & IV Forestry Elec...

 It is crazy to think that we have just over a month left of our student teaching experience! Time has been flying by and we will be finding our own classrooms in no time. As I look back on the experiences that I have had at Biglerville, I am very thankful that I was able to student teach at a program that is involved in such a wide variety of Supervised Agricultural Experience projects. One of the most interesting projects that I was able to visit was a student that had a placement SAE at the local dairy farm.  Dairy is not a huge industry here in Biglerville, in-fact, there is only one dairy farm in the area. This dairy farm is very supportive of the agriculture program at Biglerville and even hires a handful of students to help with milking.  While visiting the dairy farm, I was able to see all of the aspects of the farm that our students are involved in. This included milking cow, feeding cow, cleaning barns, and taking care of the calves. As someone who does not have...