Roadblocks and Show Pigs (Week 4 Student teaching)

State Fair week was all about being flexible. Really this whole experience so far has been all about being flexible and constantly making adjustments. 

The week started off with a pipe burst by the plant nursery that led to the strawberry field being flooded. This caused us to take some class time to try and fix the problem which was fine by me. My plans for the week included working on Punnett Squares in second period and introducing FNGLA to first period. Neither which were time sensitive so the lessons could easily be moved to later in the week. 

The irrigation problem seemed to be more complex than we thought and at that point we knew we needed to get the school district to fix it. There was a pipe under the ground that had a crack in it and had been slowly leaking for a while along with a solenoid valve that needed to be replaced. We put a band aid on the situation and waited for the county to come and fix it.  

On Thursday, we were back in the classroom and it was all about Punnett squares. The students were not afraid to let me know that they had covered this information in biology already so that shifted how much I went over the information. It became very clear that the majority of the class was very comfortable with the monohybrid Punnett Square and that we could move onto the dihybrid Punnett square the following week. 

This week was a shortened week as it was supposed to be State Fair week. The fair actually had to be postponed to April but the Swine show happened as scheduled because it is a terminal show and the pigs would have been too old in April. However, students still got Friday and Monday off (yayyy four day weekend). 

Our work week extended into the weekend this week as we had some responsibilities down at the state fair. In the past, I've worked in the barn and helped the show run. This time my role was different. Mr. Sturgis is the announcer for the state fair and boy oh boy did he put me to work. I hadn't done anything like this in the past so it was definitely outside of my comfort zone. 

On Thursday, we discovered a leak in my car that caused all the radiator fluid to leak out of the tank which then caused my car to overheat. My dad put a band aid on the problem until it could be fixed on Monday. Luckily my car was able to make it through the pig show. 

The weekend ended with loading all the pigs up into the truck to head to their final destination. This was quite a challenge especially since the barn was more spread out this year to accommodate for social distancing. This made it much harder to move large volumes of pigs all at one time because they had too much space to move it. So it took some creativity to get the process moving. Within an hour and a half we had all the pigs loaded up. 

It was a pretty busy week with a lot going on but overall it was a good week!