If you walk into the Family and Consumer Science classrooms this year you would no longer see Mrs. Betty Buffington digging around in the cupboards or on her computer looking for new recipes and ideas. Nor would you see Mrs. Mary Hogan, dicing and mincing spices, preparing them for a cooking lab.
Instead, you might see Nikki Feist and Jeanne Garbers chatting about their day and putting fruits away, or discussing ideas for new lesson plans.
While many teachers ignore students’ smart comments or remarks, Feist comes right back at them with one of her own.
“Oh that movie was amazing!”a kid from the front row said and rolled his eyes as Feist discusses the previous day.
“Yeah it was! I’ll let you borrow it sometime!” Feist replied.
Feist works at Southwest as well as the high school teaching seventh an eight grade. She is a graduate from South Dakota University,
On a recent class day, students learned about kitchen math, converting and doubling recipes. When she asked the class about the strange Gs on their papers and asked if that’s how they converted them, half the class raised their hands.
“I have never seen that before until this year,”she replied, showing that teachers while teaching learn new lessons, also.
Ms. Garbers’s room had a similarly relaxed feeling, with students walking around and cleaning up their kitchens, while Garbers checked on their progress, laughing and making jokes with students as she went.
Ms. Garbers, she is awesome and is great at teaching and what she does,” Junior Cody Olson said.
All of the student interviewed had nothing but good comments to say about their new teachers.
Both teachers would like to see the classes become more hands on, where students will be making most of the food themselves instead of watching demonstrations all hour. They are both brainstorming ideas about how they could make the eighth grade FACS more hands on and are redoing the curriculum and shaking things up a bit.