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Markhardt Becomes Teacher of the Year, Shares Practices
Tony Evers: The teacher who demonstrates excellence in education each and every day and who is
the 2011 Wisconsin High School Teacher of the Year, please join me in congratulating
Brad Markhardt.
[Applause]
Bradley Markhardt: To be quite honest with you, you won't believe the number of faculty
members that went through my head.
Tony Evers: Yes.
Bradley Markhardt: And I'm like I wonder who it is. Then my name was read and it was very
surreal.
[Applause]
Tony Evers: If you had to say as a teacher, what is your best strength? What would you
say? Is it connections to the community, rapport with kids?
Bradley Markhardt: I think connection with the community is huge.
Tony Evers: Yeah.
Bradley Markhardt: This community is so rich in agriculture. So many - there are things
that, you know, from bee keeping and landscaping.
There are so many people that support education, that support kids that want to help out. You
find those people and you treat them like gold like you tell the students.
They have a brewery in town, awesome guys.
01:04
I mean, fermentation is a wonderful science and we talk about yeast and how we want to
prevent microbes from growing and how we want microbes to grow and who better than to talk
to the brewery guys about that. How do we prevent it? Where we want to prevent it and
how do we make it happen, where we want to make it happen. And these guys, they make
their living doing that.
Just so you know, I had absolutely no idea. In fact, I'm teaching middle schoolers right
now - no, my student teacher is teaching our middle school class right now and I heard
about the assembly. And I'm like, "Oh, we've got stuff to do." We're talking about defining
agriculture. Do you guys remember what we do on the second day of exploring agriscience
class?
What do we do? We make pizza, right. We talked about agriculture like the pepperoni pizza,
that's a fun time. I love that lesson. I'm like I want to take my kids in here.
02:02
I feel very strongly about getting kids out in the community. I feel very strongly about
bringing the community into my kids. I feel very strongly about making sure the students
make connections between the different subject areas that they realize there's math everywhere,
there's English everywhere, there's science everywhere.
And that those core subjects come together in their daily life. And sometimes it's very
difficult for students to make those connections and so, that's part of my job.
It is an honor and a privilege to be able to be a teacher. It is an honor and a privilege
to be able to teach in this school district. It's an honor and a privilege to teach new
students. It's an honor and a privilege to teach with this faculty and staff that we
have. It's awesome.
As a teacher, I'm a facilitator of experiences. In fact, just yesterday in the classroom we
put up the equation growth equals experience plus reflection.
03:03
And I had the students identify out why were they in my class and we've talked about growth
and then we talked about why am I here. As a teacher, what do they expect from me and
then we talked about experiences and how that's...you know, that's a big part of my role in that
equation in their growth is to provide those experiences. And then to make sure they have
time for that reflection as well.
Speaker: If I would have known that Mr. Markhardt was doing a pizza lesson, I probably would
have given him a tip and not do that today but wait until Tuesday.
Bradley Markhardt: You know, you go in to teaching because it's what you want to do.
You want to find a career where you're happy, that you enjoy doing and everything else follows.
This isn't something that you go and you seek out. This is something that was given to me
and it's a wonderful thing but I just want people to know that this goes to our district,
this goes to the people I've worked with. This is meaningful for you guys as well as
students. The students that I'm able to be able to teach.
04:11
And so it is with a very, very humble appreciative heart that I accept this. This is phenomenal.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]