A Mentor, A Teacher, A Friend Consider a career in agricultural education
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ay Nash of Biggersville, Miss., calls them “a special breed.” Erica Whitmore of Odessa, Wash., calls them “a mentor, a teacher, a friend.” And Ken Couture of Killingley, Conn., can’t imagine being anything else. They’re talking, of course, about agriculture teachers – that special kind of teacher who may be teaching students to restore a 50-year-old tractor one minute and leading a lesson on hydroponics the next. “I have been doing this 28 years and every day I enjoy going to work, every day I enjoy seeing my students and every day it’s a challenge, but I would not do anything else,” says Couture. Trouble is, there aren’t enough agriculture teachers to go around, and that’s why the National Association of
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Agricultural Educators (NAAE) continues its work to urge today’s high school seniors – that means you – to become tomorrow’s agricultural teachers. Nash, Whitmore and Couture – all agriculture teachers themselves – talked about their love of the profession in a video posted on the NAAE’s TeachAg website at www.naae.org/teachag, a site that also includes everything from games like “Are You Smarter Than Your Ag Teacher?” to “Day In the Life” blogs written by agriculture teachers. “Ag teachers spend a lot of time teaching about careers, but a lot of times they don’t think to talk about their own career,” says Julie Fritsch, NAAE communications and marketing coordinator. “Any ag teacher who has gone into the profession – probably 90 percent of them – will name their own FFA New Horizons
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