In a class of her own

Amboy high-schooler Dana Merriman says she learned an important lesson as a studentteacher: “It’s taught me that I can make a difference in someone else’s life.”

ALEX T. PASCHAL/APASCHAL@SHAWMEDIA .CO MIN A

OF HER OWN When an Amboy student took on the task of teaching an ag class, she discovered that her By Cody Cutter | Sauk Valley Media students weren’t the only ones learning to grow

he bell rang to dismiss class in the middle of the day, and

Dana Merriman joined her fellow students as they spilled into the halls at Amboy’s newly enlarged junior/senior high school building.

While the rest of the students went about their hallway hustle and bustle, dodging and darting on the way to their next destination, Dana was on her way to begin her temporary promotion in the junior high wing.

That’s when she became Miss Merriman to the eighth-graders in her Discovery Ag class.

During the fall semester, Dana jumped at the chance that Amboy High senior agriculture students have every year: the opportunity to put their ag know-how to work and teach it to future high school students for half of the year.

Opportunities like this don’t come along all that often, and Dana was eager to take a turn as a student-teacher.

“It’s taught me that I can make a difference in someone else’s life,” Merriman said. “That’s what my whole idea of this was, I really wanted to connect with students and let them know that there are so many opportunities with agriculture.”

The school’s Discovery Ag class is the earliest entry-level class catered specifically to agriculture. The 9-week course is required for each student to have before moving on to high school, where there’s a more advanced introductory class as well as specialized ag classes.

Being a student, and having been in that same class just a few years prior, helped Dana relate to the students, and vice-versa. But as she would find out, that didn’t mean there still weren’t a few students who just weren’t that interested, or tough to convince of the benefits of learning about agriculture.

But even the challenges were a chance to learn for Dana, who drew on her own experiences to spark an interest in students. She taught a variety of ag topics, which gave her a chance to be creative while sharing her love of agriculture with others, she said, adding that the students’ enthusiasm and interest made the whole experience fun. MERRIMAN cont’d to page 30

ALEX T. PASCHAL/APASCHAL@SHAWMEDIA.COM Dana discusses some of the items in the FFA display at Amboy High School. It was the FFA that helped spark her interest in agriculture, after she heard her friends talk about the program. “I didn’t really know that much about it, but being in FFA for 4 years has really opened my eyes to everything that ag has to offer.”

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“They were so interactive, they were always joking around, and they were really into the lessons,” Dana said. “That’s what made it fun and a great experience. The fact that the students were still interacting and being engaged in the topics showed me that I was doing a good job, and that they’re liking what I’m doing.”

The experience was a familiar one for Dana, whose class had its own student-teacher, Justin Yocum, when she was in eighth grade. That experience inspired her to want to follow in Justin’s footsteps when she became a senior.

Her ag teacher, Jim Heavner, was all for it, and helped her with lesson plans and other tools she needed to make her experience a success. She also got plenty of help from her principal, Janet Crownhart, and her music teacher, Travis Kemmerer.

While Dana enjoyed having more of a say in the classroom, she was still under a teacher’s supervision. Jacqueline Owensby, an eighth-grade math teacher, observed each class session, helped Dana learn the ropes when it came to running a classroom, and offered guidance on getting students’ attention.

“They gave me a lot of good insight on how to keep everything on time, and time management with creating lesson plans and stuff like that,” Dana said.

Having trusted friends also helped. One of them, Ashley Althaus, taught the same class 2 years ago and provided Dana with some of the lesson plans she used. She edited them to fit her own goals and style, which included a more interactive classroom where students worked in groups and moved about the room to learn different things.

One of them was a lesson in hunting and gathering … candy.

Dana hid candy throughout the classroom; one type represented water and the other represented food, but the trick was that there wasn’t enough for everyone.

“It was a hunting and gathering game that taught the kids how hunting and gathering worked within the very beginning stages of agriculture,” Dana said. “Once all of the animals were gone from their area, they had to move from place to place. It taught them to keep looking for food, and it was just kind of a cool way to see who survived, and who didn’t.”

Another friend, Emma Dinges, raises goats and brought them to class to show the students, who learned how to show them as if they were at a fair. Another memorable day involved touring the high school ag wing and seeing those classes in action. Students also got to see the big picture, learning how agriculture was all around them: Students read a list of everyday items and learned how they wouldn’t be possible without farms.

“I had a list of all of the things that you get from swine,” Dana said. “They use everything on the animal, and they learned a lot of things that they didn’t know, like lipstick, the dye comes from different parts of it; and there’s other things, like the bristles on a hair brush.

“They looked at the list, and they would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is something that comes from a ... ’ They were real surprised.” MERRIMAN cont’d to page 31

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Despite her current agriculture interests, Dana doesn’t live on a farm. She lives with her family — parents Dave and Brenda Merriman and brother Dillon — in Amboy. She’s also the school’s FFA secretary, and was elected vice president of Section 2 of Illinois’ FFA chapter, which includes several high schools in the north central part of the state.

There’s more on top of that outside of her ag activities: In addition to her studies, Dana also participates in Student Council, Leo’s Club, Outdoors Club, softball, being the school band’s drum major and singing in choir; and she’s gearing up to play the title character in the school’s spring musical, “Moana Jr.” from March 11-13 at the high school auditorium. She also won the 2021 Miss Amboy pageant, which she considers one of her proudest achievements.

While going to high school opened the door for all of those opportunities, learning more about agriculture made the biggest impact on her. Growing up in town, she didn’t know a whole lot about agriculture, and even less about FFA. When some older friends got to talking about the their involvement in FFA, it eventually caught Merriman’s attention and pulled her in.

“I didn’t really know that much about it, but being in FFA for 4 years has really opened my eyes to everything that ag has to offer,” Dana said. “I started falling in love with it. I started taking [more] ag classes and trying to soak up everything that I could and constantly learning new things.”

This semester, Dana is continuing her studies in an ag science class, where students are learning the concepts behind constructing farm buildings, and some of those concepts have made their way from the farm to the stage, where students can apply what they’ve learned to the building of sets for “Moana Jr.,” including a boat.

After high school, Dana plans to continue with her agriculture studies in college. She hasn’t chosen yet where to attend, but by mid-January she had been accepted to Illinois State, Southern Illinois and Iowa State universities. As far as what field she’ll go into, she’s still thinking about it. Who knows. She may even become a teacher again.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said of her time as a student-teacher. “It was a good experience. It was really fun. I’d definitely do it again.”

ALEX T. PASCHAL/ APASCHAL@SHAWMEDIA.COM

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