After a decorated 41 years of teaching middle and high school Vo-Ag and leading 105 teams to the top five in the state at the South Dakota FFA Convention, last year, Craig Shryock retired from Wessington Springs Middle / High School with 39 of his years in the Springs Vo-Ag classroom.
Now half a year into retirement, in between feeding his cows and traveling to mounted shooting competitions with his wife Kelli, Shryock has had a little more time to reflect on his four decades of teaching and the impact he had on generations of students.
Still active in the school community, Shryock can also be found driving football players and wrestlers to games and tournaments, helping out at Land and Range Contests and driving bus for FFA members headed to meetings, conventions and contests.
“When I reminisce with kids I had one year ago or twenty years ago, they still talk about setting goals, meeting them and the means required to get there,” he said. “My aim was to help kids learn how to set goals and learn how to achieve them. That’s the biggest thing students took away from there — with that, kids will succeed in anything they do.”
He calls the Vo-Ag shop the “neutralizer” because kids across the whole gamut of book smarts and handiness begin on a level playing field when working on shop projects.
“When I got to work with kids all four years of high school and see unmotivated students turn around and get excited about achieving the goals they set, they got a lot out of it and so did I,” Shryock said. “I taught them to work hard and play hard.”
In addition to the “work hard play hard” values Shryock instilled in students, he also taught them that giving back should be a way of life.
“If you’re going to be in ag, you don’t want anyone going hungry,” he states matter-of-factly to all of his students about the extensive outreach he and his students did for the local food pantry. “Charity starts at home.”
Shryock and his students were also integral in the renovation beginnings of Shakespeare Garden in the 1970s and 80s and continued to “turn over the dirt” for the Shakespeare Garden Society when they requested help over the course of many decades.
“One of the things that was pretty cool was to see a brand new generation of kids working at Shakespeare Garden,” he reflected, as he thought about the time spent teaching multiple generations of families. “You know how I knew it was time to quit — I started telling kids stories about their great grandpas. At the last FFA banquet I did the math… 75% of the kids there in that room, I had taught one or both of their parents.”
Shryock said that regardless of the generation or even a student’s background, after taking his classes, students left with skills that would serve them for a lifetime.
Knowing that he had that kind of an impact during his career might be helping him settle in to retirement.
“There are really no worries in retirement,” he said. “It opened up a lot of opportunity to do what we love, like see our grandkids in Pierre and go shoot. I can feed my cows in the daylight now and when I go shoot I don’t have to spend two weeks getting ready for it around school. Now I scoop snow and try and keep cows fed.”
Shryock is enthusiastic about the FFA program’s future and the recent grant award (SEE PAGE ONE OF THIS WEEK'S PRINT AND E-EDITION) that will help commission a mural in “my nursing home corridor.”
“Brady (Duxbury) is my former student and has already helped the kids earn a second in Land and first in Range,” he said. “He got the kids fired up and took a whole bus load to Pierre. He knows kids learn by trusting them and getting out of their way. The program will look a little different, but will be a good solid program.”