Patty Hanna
Vice Principal of Academics and Student Services at Bishop Hartley High School
Teachers are welcome to contact me about STEM, world language pedagogy, and policy studies. I’m interested in networking regarding curricular content on Transdisciplinary Project-Based Learning (TPBL) Units, World Language Units, and Policy Studies/Policy Units.
What about teaching excites you?
The best thing about teaching is being able to ignite students’ curiosity about the world— to encourage them to ask difficult questions and to wrestle with the answers to those questions as they seek solutions to the world’s most challenging problems. Nothing excites me more than when my students begin to ask questions that don’t have easy answers, and then get inspired to engage in the learning process to try to find or invent better answers!
What was your “aha” moment when you realized the value of using agriculture as a vehicle to teach science?
I had so many “aha” moments during this externship that it changed my entire way of thinking about what it is I do in the classroom. Probably the largest “aha” moment I experienced was in learning about humanity’s need to increase crop yield dramatically in our lifetime in order to feed the world’s population. Touring the Ag-Engineering Department and speaking with the farmers who are doing work and research to address the problem of yield opened my eyes to just how advanced of a science agriculture has become. Farming truly is a science! I had no idea!
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