Kent Peterson provided today's "Member Minute". We were introduced to his diverse family via PowerPoint pictures - great kids and grandkids doing great things! Kent grew up in Illinois and attended Pharmacy School at the University of Iowa. He later came to Minnesota for his Masters Degree in Public Health and then joined the MN Department of Health where he worked for 28 years. In his "second act", he returned to his pharmacy background, working 13 years for Cub Pharmacy before retiring. Kent's primary interests outside of family are orchids, travel and Rotary!
Today's speaker was Martha Rush, an award-winning teacher in Economics at Mounds View HS. She began her career as a newspaper journalist focused on education topics, which led her to ultimately decide to go back to school to become certified in teaching. Lucky for us, she landed at MVHS, and began to put her teaching theories to work. She quickly saw success with her approach of re-thinking the way people commonly teach challenging subjects such as Economics. Her re-imagining led her to write and publish her book "Beat Boredom", which is founded on the principle of engaging students rather than lecturing them. She has become a consultant on this topic to other schools and teacher groups looking to improve teaching methods. Moving to a more engaging style can be very uncomfortable for teachers as it feels like giving up control of the classroom. But Martha is a firm believer that only a very few students learn well under a traditional lecture approach. She believes the following approaches to be far superior: Storytelling, Discussion/Debate, Simulation, Problem Solving, Competition and Involvement in authentic tasks.