My 4-H Story--2004--Tenth Year in 4-H

My 4-H Story

Written 2004

Age: 16

Year in 4-H: 10

     Wow, I have been in 4-H for 10 years.  That's amazing!  The other amazing thing is how fast this year has gone by.  I have learned so much and met many people while gaining many new friends.

     Hi. My name is John Trammell.  I am sixteen years old and have been a San Bernardino County All-Star for one year now.  I was also the president of our club and I had a good time working with the club members.  

     How did I get in to 4-H you may wonder.  Well, my dad, Steve, was in 4-H when he was a youth and he wanted me to join so I could learn life skills, leadership skills, and citizenship skills so that I can grow into a contributing member of our society.  Now on the other side, my mom, Rozie,, had to learn right along with me what 4-H is about because she has never heard of it before.  After one year my mom became the leader of Arroyo Verde Club which is call East Valley 4-H today.  Three years after I had joined, my sister, Ashley, also joined 4-H.

     One of the new things that I joined at my high school is the AVID club.  This is run like a regular class except that it gets people ready to apply to colleges and universities.  I went on several field trips visiting different college campuses and I also took the PSAT test.  I am going to be in AVID again in the next school year except that I will be narrowing down the colleges I would like to attend.  I will also be taking some leadership positions as well.

  

     This 4-H year started with a great learning experience.  I attended the California 4-H Technology Conference, which takes place right before State Leadership Conference.  I had no idea that CTC would change how I looked at computers.  I took the web development session which taught me how to build a website.  At first when the conference started I was scared because they first taught me about HTML and I thought I had to remember the way the codes are written.  But then they had us use a program called Microsoft Front Page 2002 XP.  This program is as easy to use as Microsoft Word is to use.  While at the conference, I had asked for permission to set up a club website.  But once I came home I had another idea.  Why not create a county website that would make it easier for everyone to get information that they needed?  So again, I asked for permission to set up this web page and I made this my Emerald Star Project.  The website is up and running and has a lot of information that all of the San Bernardino County 4-H members can use.  I plan on keeping this website up for a long while.  Feel free to visit the web site at http://clubs.ca4h.org/sanbernardino (note: Website no longer runs as of July 2010).  But then I got another idea.  South Section Teen Council could use a web site to get out information about what is happening for teens in the South Section.  I once more asked for permission to set up this web site and right now it is a work in progress.  I will be adding more information as I get it.

After the CTC conference, I attended State Leadership Conference for the first time and it was fun.  IT was like Teen Involvement Conference but at the state level wiht over 600 teens in attendance.  I met old friends and made new friends.  Also people from the countries of Japan and Canada were there and I got to learn much about their culture and country.  At the conference I also learned new leadership skills.  SLC was a fun conference and I will be attending the conference again this year.  I highly recommend all teens to attend this great conference.

     

     Our first club meeting was held on September 8, 2003.  That meeting felt a little strange because it was my first meeting being the club president.  After that it was easy because I learned how to conduct the club business quickly so that we could do fun things afterwards.

     My major projects for this year were photography, citizenship, leadership, computers, and wildlife.  I was the teen leader for the photography project again.  I like working with my leader and with the members.  Each year I have learned new leadership skills.  This year we had good photography project meetings where the members went on great photography shoot field trips, learned to mount their photos, and learned to evaluate their own photos.  For my photography project I learned to work with a digital camera.  I also learned how to manipulate the digital photos using the computer.  Working with photos on the computer can be a lot of fun.  The final picture many not look at all like what I originally took a photo of.

One of the new projects that I started this year was computers.  I helped my mom set up the computers in her classroom.  At one of the meetings, we took a computer apart and learned what all the different parts were and what they looked like.  We also learned about transistors and resistors and what purpose they served.  Part of my computer learning was about web design.  That started at the Computer Technology Conference at the state.  That continued on through emails with the computer technology corps.  It was a great learning experience to set up three different websites.  I plan on continuing on in this project.  This coming year will start me out attending the National Technology Conference in St. Louis and the ESRI users conference in San Diego.  In St. Louis I will be learning about event technology and in San Diego I will be learning about the GIS/GPS systems and the software that goes with that.  The best part is that I will be applying for membership to the Computer Technology Corps at the state level.  They take care of the 4-H State website and provide many other technological resources throughout the state.  Technology is a feild that is a fast changing field.  It has come a long way from the first computers that took up the space of an entire office building.  This is one of the fields of interest I am exploring for a college degree.  

Leadership is an important part of my 4-H experience.  I have been a Junior Leader and I am a Teen Leader for our clubs photography project.  I have attended and also taken part of the County's Leadership Day.  At the secional level, I have been the Teen Council Treasurer this year.  I was also the alternate youth representative to the State Leader's Council.  I have been able to attend two State Leader's Council meetings because there were two elected representatives that were not able to attend.  At the South Section Leader's Retreat, I was there as the photographer and the co-producer of the afterglow for the retreat.  I even got a funny photo of Carol McNeil having fun with the youth members that attended the retreat.  This year I attended the State Leadership Conference, as I have mentioned before, and I will be attending again this year.  But my biggest leadership responsibilities were done as a San Bernardino County All-Star.  I worked at many county events and represented San Bernardino County as a All-Star at South Sectional events and at State level as well.   One of the most challenging events I worked on was being a judge at State Presentation Day.  Originally I went there to be a room host, but because they were short on judges I was asked to be a judge.  You have to be sixteen years or older to be a judge.  I was assigned to intermediate demonstrations and I found out how difficult it is to be a judge when there are so many excellent demonstrations.  That was a very unique opportunity for me and I am glad I was able to participate at a higher level of leadership.

     Another great leadership opportunity came to me for this years combined San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County Summer Camp.  Dee Keese who is a LA summer camp committee member talked to me at one of the sectional meetings and said I should apply for a staff position.  I kept waiting to hear about when to apply and had no idea how to do it.  Then at another South Section meeting, I saw Dee again and she asked why I hadn't applied for any of the positions.  She immediately gave me the information and I put in my application.  I was made the Youth Staff member in charge of the assistant staff members.  I had to sign up assistant staff members at the camp and then I had to make sure that they did their jobs.  I was also then apart of the planning committee for the entire camp.  I had to attend meetings in Los Angeles as well as attend a weekend camp training session in May.  This was one of the best experiences I have had this year.  I got to meet so many great teens from the LA area and made many great new friends.  For the next year's camp, I am going to apply again for a staff position, possibly for the youth camp director position.  I am also going to encourage more of our San Bernardino County youth to participate and to attend this really great camp.

     Last year I attended the California Focus from the second time.  I really had a great time attending this event.  This year my group had to focus on completing the plan of action we had written up.   Our plan of action was to show people how to properly retire worn out United States flags.  It was a challenge trying to find out what the whole procedure is to retire a flag is.  We went to several sources on the internet and finally put a flag retirement ceremony together, including music that we thought fit in with the 4-H citizenship criteria and provided the appropriate respect for our flag.  OUr first ceremony was done at our summer camp last year.  Everyone thought it was a great ceremony.  We did a "dry" (no fire) flag retirement for County Field Day.  That went very well. 

     This year's goal was to attend Washington Focus.  We started out with a bigger group but there were several people that were not able to attend.  We are down to four members.  We also added on a member from Imperial County and one from Kings County.  This is going to be a very expensive trip so we had to do a lot of fundraising.  We worked Route 66 and a senior citizen health fair for some grant money.  We put together a county cookbook made up of recipes from many members, past and present, within San Bernardino County.  We still have plenty of cookbooks to sell.  Just ask me and I will gladly sell y ou one fpr a mere ten dollars.

     The particular trip we are taking will be for 12 days.  We are going to travel to Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and New York City.  We are going to learn about the Federal government and we are going to meet with Senator Barbara Boxer.  We are also going to meeting with Congressman Jerry Lewis.  We are also hoping to see the White House.  Those tickets are very hard to get and we are hoping that we will be able to get them.  We are also going to see the National Archives.  We are going to be as busy as we were for California Focus.  I am really looking forward to this great learning trip.  I am also planning on having a lot of fun while we are back east.

     I can hardly believe that it is already time to do my record book.  This year has been very busy for me and next year promises to be even busier.  I can hardly wait to do some of the things that I am planning on participating in.