When Wrenches are Thrown

As time goes on and workloads increase, sometimes we find that bad habits that we may have been able to sweep under the rug before, are now large stressors in our lives that cause drastic consequences.  Such a thing happened to myself on the turn of my senior year just before the spring semester when I was set to student teach.  I had completed my final presentation and sat before my professors ashamed, sad, and unsure.  You see, the scenario I mentioned above happened to me.  

My whole life, I have struggled greatly with time management and planning.  I loved to do so many
things and would try to invest myself in sports, academics, music, and language classes only to find out that I was only human and could not do everything.  I often overbooked myself.  However, instead of the sheer amount of activities I was in motivating me to work harder and get things done early, they caused me so much stress that in an attempt to avoid thinking about how busy I was, I would procrastinate to the last minute where I hardly had enough time to complete the tasks.  

Although this was a large issue in habit and thinking, it never caused severe consequences for my life until just as I was about to student teach.  I had always been able to work around it until then.  Instead of completing all of the unit and lesson plans that I had to write early and on time, in the midst of my heavy involvement and leadership in another club, I put the unit and lesson plans off until too late.  Thus, once it came to the end of the fall semester, I had a mess of unfinished, jumbled unit and lesson plans that would not suffice for student teaching.  For a number of different reasons, I had also failed to find housing and had nowhere to stay while I was student teaching since it was far from where I grew up.  

So what could I do?  I was clearly not ready to student teach.  I had some options.  Did I change my
major and graduate with only one extra semester, did I try to finish all of my unit and lesson plans over winter break and continue on to student teach in the spring, or did I add a minor that spring and student teach the following spring.  I decided on the last option.  

Thus, I am writing today in the fall of my 5th year of college having completed a minor in Horticulture with a new student teaching placement at Penn Manor High School in Lancaster County.  Having learned and still learning from my mistakes, I am well on my way to completing all of my unit and lesson plans and am delving deeper into getting to know my future students and cooperating teachers.  

Growing flower crops in the Penn State greenhouses.

God knew what he was doing through all of this and turned a deep fault of mine into an opportunity for me to grow exponentially in planning and time management, knowledge of Horticulture, and in a desire to work for him through teaching agriculture internationally.  I am now in a new cohort of lovely peers that I was able to attend PAAE and the FFA state convention with.  Overall lesson is this, do your best and when you fail, grow, learn, and move on as a better, stronger person.

State FFA Convention

PAAE Convention with some members of the new Cohort!