Lefler AVID students harvest knowledge, plant seeds about agriculture careers during UNL visit

How many plants would you have to grow in Nebraska to harvest a million bushels of corn?
 
Lefler Middle School students learned how to reap answers to questions like that during a field trip that taught them about math, agriculture and horticulture.
 
Twenty-eight sixth graders in Lefler’s AVID (Advancement Via individual Determination) program traveled to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln East Campus for a full day of activities. They learned about corn, soybeans and many other plants from UNL College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources (CASNR) professors and specialists.
 
Lefler students Tali and Brandon said they enjoyed exploring indoor and outdoor classrooms on campus. They spoke just after the Lions used their math knowledge to calculate kernel-based amounts of a million bushels of corn.
 
“I really learned a lot about division,” Tali said. “I also learned about how things grow. I didn’t know a whole lot about bushels and stuff like that, so I learned about that too.”
 
“I’ve enjoyed being in groups and doing all of these activities,” Brandon said. “The math was actually really kind of fun. It’s also been fun learning about plants and stuff, because they’re actually interesting once you get to know more about them.”

Tammera Mittelstet is the CASNR statewide education coordinator and walked alongside students throughout the day. She said it was important for them to learn how much agriculture impacts their everyday lives in Nebraska. She felt the campus visit also gave them a first glimpse of how many potential careers are available in agriculture and natural resources.
 
Brandon agreed with Mittelstet’s assessment.
 
“I feel like there could be a bunch of possible careers,” Brandon said. “You can see that they’re okay to do. It’s really interesting to know that there are all sorts of cool things to go into.”
 
Linda Romero watched students examine rows of corn and soybeans under sunny skies in the UNL Teaching Gardens. The idea for the Lefler field trip came after Romero attended the CASNR AG/HORT Soybean Science Institute this summer. She and CASNR/LPS Early College and Career STEM Pathway Coordinator Bailey Feit talked about the possibility of bringing students to campus.
 
Two months later, their vision for a fun and educational time sprouted into reality.
 
“Bailey and I built a connection there and I said I want to bring my AVID class because I had so much fun with it,” Romero said. “I wanted them also to experience what I experienced here, so we took about two months to plan it. This is my third year teaching AVID, and I know my students would not have this experience if it weren’t for AVID in place, so it was important to me to have them come today.”
 
Every student received one corn seed and one soybean seed when they first arrived. Professor Donald Lee and associate professors Meghan Sindelar and Leah Sandall then showed them why corn plants have tassels, what soybeans look like from a close-up view and how agronomists protect crops and cultivate new types of hybrids.
 
Brandon said he wasn’t aware of the different uses for corn and soybeans before walking through the rows of crops.
 
“I knew very little,” Brandon said. “I just knew they were a plant. I didn’t know all of these interesting things about them.”
 
The group then traveled to room 280A in Plant Sciences Hall to connect the fields of math and agriculture. Lee explained to them that one bushel of corn would fill up a six-gallon container, and all six groups of students gathered two ears of corn and two soybean plants. They then began computing numbers on whiteboards to solve their story problems.
 
Lee earned a doctorate in plant breeding and genetics from Montana State University in 1988 and currently teaches and researches crop and weed genetics at UNL. 
 
“I’m really impressed,” Lee said. “Linda has done a great job with this class. They’re really prepared.”
 
“I’m having fun figuring out the math,” Tali said. “I like learning about soybeans and corn and agriculture.”
 
Everyone then returned outside to walk through a greenhouse filled with hot-weather plants. They examined prickly cacti, looked at large leaves of a banana plant and stood amazed at the many colors and textures found throughout the heated indoor space.
 
Romero said she believes the field trip will provide fertile learning soil for all of Lefler’s AVID students in the future.
 
“They didn’t know what soybeans were before coming here, so I had them do a little bit of research on that,” Romero said. “Then when we get back from today, now we can have some conversations about, ‘Oh, now that you saw corn, you saw soybeans, you saw all these different plants, and what do you think about it?’ It should be pretty fun to hear what they have to say.”

To learn more about AVID, visit our website at https://home.lps.org/avid/.

To learn about the Early College and Career STEM Focus Program at Northeast, visit our website at https://eccsp.lps.org/.
 
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