Career Day and the Calf in the Principal's Chair
I bring a calf to Dublin High School for career day, and she finds the principal's chair a better fit than any of us expected.
The high school in Dublin asked me to speak at career day, and I said yes, thinking it was the kind of thing a person does for the community. I figured I would give a short talk about dairy jobs, hand out a few brochures, and go home. The school asked if I might bring a visual aid. I said I knew the very one.
The visual aid was a two-week-old Holstein calf named Pickles. I loaded her into the bed of my truck with a bale of straw and drove her into town. The students were thrilled. By ten o'clock, a crowd of about eighty teenagers had gathered in the gym, and Pickles stood on a tarp, calm as a deacon, while they took turns petting her.
The principal was a serious woman who had been at the school for twenty years. She greeted me at the door, shook my hand, and told me she had never seen the gym so quiet. She then excused herself to take a phone call in her office. By the time she returned, Pickles had wandered through the open door of the front office, tilted her head, and climbed onto the principal's leather chair.
There she sat, calf on chair, looking like a very small executive. A few students peered in through the window and started to giggle. The principal stopped in the doorway and stared. Then, with great composure, she folded her hands and said, 'Well, I did say we wanted more leadership at this school.' The whole hall erupted.
The students loved it, and three of them signed up for a farm visit. One is now working weekends on my dairy and wants to study animal science. The principal kept a photo of Pickles in the chair on her desk for years. If you want to know how to spark that kind of interest in your own area, the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension has youth programs, and farm.FM shares a few of these classroom tales.
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