A little bit biased (connecting home and school experiences)

I am a little biased when it comes to my content area and to be frank, I'm pretty proud of it.  It's true, my experiences as a child and young adult have shaped my paradigm of agriculture and the necessity for it.  I feel that it is necessary you know that I feel this way before you read on.  I am opinionated and this is my template to share my opinion.

The beginnings

I wasn't born on a farm or ranch but my parents were.  I was actually raised in a "city" from the age of 0 to almost 6.  I can dimly remember coming out to my grandparents ranch in Deeth to see the sheep and cows and family.  I know that I was like almost any boy my age and loved the outdoors which included getting into as much trouble as I could when we went to the ranch.  It's still unknown to me the exact reasoning, but the summer between my pre-school and kindergarten year we moved from our little suburban Elko, Nevada home and moved out to the ranch.  We took over the house my dad grew up in because my grandparents were moving in with my great-grandfather who could no longer take care of all his needs alone.  I know lived across the yard from my grandparents and just across the fence from the best learning environment I have ever known.  The Grock Ranch.

Lessons learned

Working for a worthwhile cause
Stick-to-it-iveness
Appreciation for the land, others and my own abilities
Responsibilty
Numerous technical skills like caring for newborn and sick livestock, welding, fence building, irrigating, record keeping, operating machinery and how to have fun with nothing more than a stick and rock in a barn yard.
This list is not all inclusive.  I doubt I could sit down at once and come up with everything I learned, these are just a couple examples of some that stuck out. 

How these experiences shaped my thoughts about ag and teaching

As I said before, I am biased.  I think that my experiences on the ranch have given me such a great understanding of what  is needed in agriculture that it probably only makes me more biased.  I believe that there are many lessons that can be learned in an old fashioned agriculture experience where you are working outside with some form of crop or livestock; sweating, building calluses, getting frustrated, seeing hard work pay off with a successful crop or a load of livestock, watching the sun go up and down in the same day, and having time to yourself to think about a little bit of everything in the seat of a tractor.  With that said, I also know that agriculture is much more diverse than our idea of old fashioned farming and ranching.  We have the ability to say that almost everything is related to and influenced by agriculture.  Over 200 careers and 20 million people employed in agriculture related fields shows me that I can't simply think inside the box of cow, plows and sows. 
I am going to use my agriculture experience to influence my teaching in two ways.  First, I am going to insist that my students get as much of the lessons that can be learned in agriculture by the hard work, sweating, experiencing failure and success, getting dirty and having more responsibility than your average high school age student does.  I can do this by incorporating hands on, practical application to as many of my lessons as possible.  I am very blessed because much of my curriculum allows me to do this fairly seamlessly.  Secondly, I am going to insist that my students understand the greater idea of agriculture.  Not every student I have is going to be a farmer.  Not every student I have is even going to end up employed in agriculture.  However, every student is going to be impacted and have an impact on agricultrue in multiple ways.  I want every student to leave my class realizing how much agriculture has to play in their daily lives and how to remain an informed consumer.

Linking to students' background knowledge

This topic is a little more difficult as I don't know exactly where I am going to be teaching.  One thing I can think of though because I just  did a lesson on it was livestock judging.  In animal science, livestock selection and judging is one of the state standards.  I don't think of it as, we all are going to need to select livestock in our careers as much as I can see us all having to make difficult decisions and be able to defend them.  I could begin by bringing up a controversial topic and giving students the opportunity to defend their opinion on it.  Then say, what you just did is the exact same thing we are going to be doing here, the only difference is we are using livestock as our topic of choice in agriculture.  I think students can make a connection like that because they are often wondering how this has anything to do with their daily lives.  Another connection I believe I can build upon is the unknown contact with agriculture almost all students have on a regular basis.  Agriculture by-products is a great example of this.  It is a state standard and students are often unaware of the myriad of items they use on a daily basis that are derived, at least partially, from animals.  Many students will be shocked to know that jello comes from hooves and bones and make up they are wearing might have cows blood in it. 
Depending on where I teach, drawing upon a student's agriculture background could be very easy or fairly difficult.  My extensive background in ag gives me a good basis to be able to compare and activate background knowledge either way.  I am very thankful for that as I look toward student teaching getting closer.