MAC 2012 Teacher of the Year

 

MAC is proud to announce that our Teacher of the Year for 2012 is Jessica Ouimet, 5th grade teacher at the Philip G. Coburn Elementary School in West Springfield. Jessica participated in our 2010 Summer Graduate Course, where we quickly discovered her wealth of knowledge and experience with growing and raising her own food, and sharing that knowledge with her students. Since then Jessica has offered two workshops on chickens and embryology for our Winter Conferences and also welcomed teachers to her home in Westfield and fledgling farm in Russell for an educational workshop. We truly appreciate her support of MAC and her enthusiasm for agriculture, which she shares readily with others.

 

Building on the experiences of raising all of her own meat and growing and canning much of her own fruits and vegetables, Jessica tries to pass on and teach her students a life-long respect and knowledge for the world around them and the part they play in this world. While many of her students and their parents have always lived in suburbia, the school also houses the district's ELL elementary students, many of whom have farming backgrounds or their parents have farming backgrounds. These students bring a different perspective to her classroom.

 

Jessica’s and Alan’s farm is located in Russell, the next town over from where they live in Westfield. They purchased the land in 2003 with the intention of building a home there. They married in 2004 in the field. The farming piece started with hatching chicks in the classroom, when she decided to keep them as part of an egg laying flock. To the hatched white leghorns, they added seven other chicks of other varieties. That first flock had just 15 chickens and now the laying flock consists of around 80 chickens, 4 turkeys, and 6 guinea fowl, and 13 ducks.

 

Of course, that first batch of chicks had many roosters (too many for such a small flock) and the extras became dinners. Jessica says “This was the first time I had to look my food in the eye and take care of it personally. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but I have developed a whole new level of respect for my food.” Since then, Jess will not buy or eat any conventionally raised meat. They raise all of our own meat poultry (chickens, turkeys, ducks) and now pigs as well. This allows them to ensure that the animals who will become their food will have a happy, healthy existence where they can be outside in the sun and fresh air, have adequate space, eat grass (and other tasty plants) and bugs. She tells us “I respect and value their lives too much to accept anything less. Plus, I feel the meat our animals produce is of a higher quality when compared to conventionally raised.”

 

The small amount of beef they eat comes from another local farm with similar values. They also purchase milk from a local grass-based dairy. They are all about humane treatment and respect for the animals. Jessica lives by the philosophy “It is out of this respect that I share my love of hatching, raising, and keeping chickens. I feel if more people were educated about where their food comes from, more people would demand change -- change in the grocery store and therefore change on their dinner plates.”

 

Because of this deep respect for raising her own food, Jessica blogs about the farm and her experiences, and also enjoys helping other teachers start their own embryology projects. It offers her a chance to pass on the knowledge and hopefully the passion!

 

Jessica does hatch chicks every year with her students, and this last school year they hatched turkey poults and guinea fowl keets as well. She is passionate about keeping these animals and feels any time you can share something you love with your students, they can tell and the excitement is contagious. You get a higher level of buy in and investment from your students.

 

Jessica has also brought students to the local farmers' market. She used the trip to introduce the idea of getting kids interested in eating healthier, understanding seasonality, and valuing where their food comes from. Along this same thought of knowing where your food comes from and how it is produced, she has brought in maple sap collected from one of the taps on her farm, which they boiled down into maple syrup.

 

The students were amazed in observing the sap to syrup ratio (which would mean nothing to them without the visual). She helped establish a garden at school (donating many plants by splitting things from her own garden) which has provided many learning opportunities (plant life cycle, composting, how changes in weather affect plants, etc.). Students have snacked from it, sometimes eating fresh onions and raw cabbage right out of the garden at recess!

They saved seed in the fall and used those seeds to start new plants (tomatoes and basil) in the spring. These plants went home with the students to hopefully start (or add to) their own gardens. Jessica reports “What I have found is that there are many agriculture related topics which can assist in teaching required curriculum, in areas other than just science! Jessica tells us "Ultimately, through these experiences, what I try to pass on and teach my students is a life-long respect and knowledge for the world around them and the part they play in this world as future stewards of this planet."