What is society's conception of agriculture? Apparently not what it used to be. This coming fall will be my second year teaching in an urban school with approximately 2200 students. When I started last year, many of my students told me that there were a lot farms in that area. As I was telling my husband this, he gave me a question to pose to the class for their daily question. The question was: What color cow does chocolate milk come from? Many, many of my students wrote down "brown" or "black and white" (mix black and white and get brown). I told my students that cows don't give chocolate milk. Many argued with me that they thought it was a trick question and that they really knew cows don't give chocolate milk. Really?

I'm sure some of my students know that chocolate milk doesn't come from cows. However, I think that many of my students do think that chocolate milk comes from cows or some of my students simply don't know. This lack of awareness/knowledge is becoming increasingly frustrating. Because of the testing that is now required of students in order to graduate from high school, many schools are only focusing on the "core" subjects: math, English, social studies, etc. and leaving, or dropping, programs that provide our students to be more rounded and knowledgeable, such as vo-ag, woods, and metals.

The cutting of these programs is largely due to the No Child Left Behind act. As a teacher, I do believe that this Act is beneficial to students; however, many "extra" material/content that teachers like to cover in the course of a year is being cut out because we have to cover the standards that are given to us by the state in order to prepare our students to pass the required test. Yes, we are basically teaching to the test. Anything else that we like to do but is not covered by a standard is simply cut out of our teaching.

As a farmer's wife and teacher, it is very frustrating for me to see that students have no idea about where their food comes from, how a farm actually works, or even what some farm animals look like. Because of this lack of knowledge, I have decided to incorporate a week of agriculture education into my teaching starting with this school year. Although I will be trying to find standards that fit with my teaching, foremost I want students to gain knowledge about the world they and I live in. They want to educate me about their world and where they live; I want to educate them about my world and where I live. If we want our consumers and society to understand farming, we need to start with our children.