Skip to main content

MEET MICHAELA

NOT LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Welcome to my marvelous life!! Hi, my name is Michaela Smith and I am very excited to blog about myself and "all things ag." I am currently an agricultural and extension education major at Penn State University, and I am looking forward to student teaching in the spring of 2021. While I finally know that I have found my calling, it was not an obvious choice for me at first. In high school I knew that I loved agriculture, but could not figure out what path I wanted to take, so I figured that ag would be more of a hobby than a career. Right out of high school, I went to UPJ to major in pre-med. After just a year, I thought I would give this whole "ag thing" a try and went to Penn State Altoona to major in agribusiness management. After a year and half, and a move to University Park, I knew that my calling was in education and I began to make the change, and here I am now!

FAMILY
My mom and dad, Anita and Mike, are both teachers at the elementary and high school that I attended. I have a younger brother, Jared, who plays football at Shippensburg University, a younger sister Halee, who is committed to play basketball next year at Quinnipiac University, an even younger sister Olivia, who is a junior in high school, and an EVEN younger sister Charlee, who is in third grade this year. Yes my brother is stuck with four sisters, but I secretly think he loves it! I also have a very supportive boyfriend of four years, John-Michael, who is graduating this spring with a bachelor of science in nursing.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN
Showing pigs at the county fair was something that I did from the ages 8-21 and was the foundation for my love of agriculture. Throughout the years, I showed every animal possible through 4-H and FFA (steers, goats, rabbits, sheep, dairy beef and my favorite- pigs). I soon found myself involved in every FFA competition and conference as humanly  possible and served as treasurer, parliamentarian, and vice president throughout my time in FFA. I encouraged Halee and Olivia to join FFA (especially parliamentary procedure) and love helping Charlee in 4-H showing pigs just like I did. I hope that someday I can inspire others to either love agriculture or
 teach them to appreciate and understand how important agriculture is for everyone.

I am so excited to continue this journey and hope to have you all along for the ride!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fully Embodying the 3-Circle Model of Ag Ed!

Each week of student teaching seems to go by faster than the last. As I spend my Friday reflection on week four of student teaching, I can't help but to smile at all the activities, meetings, and observations that took place. Thus far, I have only been teaching Agricultural Mechanics and Veterinary Science and they both have been going great. I will soon be adding Horticulture to the mix!  My highlights from the week include:  A soldering demonstration Preparing for a fetal pig dissection An FFA Officer Team meeting My first SAE visit (to view this blog, click here) #GLAG21 On Tuesday, I started teaching Ag Mechanics with a soldering demonstration so that the students could watch and ask questions about soldering before they practiced for themselves. Unfortunately, time got the best of me and my demonstration ended up taking an entire class period. If I could do this differently, I would try to condense this demonstration or set up stations so that the students could start pra...
5 comments
Read more

All Good Thing Must Come to an End

This week was my very last week student teaching at Pequea Valley High School and a fun one to end on. Right now, I am only reaching one class and it is the class that I taught the full 14 weeks. We had a HUGE event take place that I felt very fortunate to be a part of and there were many sad goodbyes and thank you's.  Vet Science was the class that I had from start to finish, so naturally, I began slightly attached to every part of this class. We had the fetal pig dissection, animal restraints, bandaging, suturing, and more! Every step of the way was pushing myself outside of my comfort zone and learning new content areas. This week, the focus was on suturing, which is one of the topics that I was most excited to learn. While we only spent a few days on this, I learned so much about knot tying and techniques. For this lesson, I performed a demonstration on how to tie a knot for suturing and then students practiced on rulers. It was a fun lesson overall, and the students were pros ...
2 comments
Read more

Well That was a Blur

As I am writing this blog and reflecting on this past week of student teaching, I'm left wondering what even happened. It was one of those weeks where one day you woke up and it was week 5 of student teaching and by the end of the day it is already week 6! This past week started with no school on Monday, and ended with a snow day and a virtual learning day (because of the snow). So with only one full in-school session and another half day of in-school learning, I don't have many days to reflect on, but I do have so much to look forward to! Recap of Week 5: Students are still working on soldering in Intro to Ag Mechanics, and I am realizing how hard it is to have students in completely different places in the shop. I know that most of that has to do with COVID, but I also know that this could happen any year with sicknesses, sports, etc. It is hard to manage students in a shop that are ready to move onto the next project, and still have some that need a demonstration to start th...
5 comments
Read more