Martha Sevetson Rush




Martha Sevetson Rush has taught at Mounds View High School in Arden Hills, Minnesota, for 20 years. Before becoming a teacher, she spent five years as an education reporter for the Wichita Eagle in the early 1990s. After hundreds of hours spent visiting schools and interviewing teachers, parents, students, administrators and political leaders, she decided to get her teaching license and student teach as an assignment for the newspaper.

Although she had intended to return to the newsroom and use the experience to inform her reporting, she fell in love with teaching and resigned from her newspaper job instead – a decision she has never regretted. She’s passionate about making challenging subjects like constitutional law, macroeconomics and the biology of the brain accessible to all high school students, and she enjoys the daily challenge of keeping teenagers engaged.

In her career, Martha has taught journalism, language arts, American history, economics, personal finance, government, civil liberties and psychology. She currently teaches AP Microeconomics, AP Macroeconomics, and AP Psychology. She has coached two student teams to championships in the National Economics Challenge, and she has also taken student teams to the National Personal Finance Challenge, the Junior Achievement National Student Leadership Summit and an international Junior Achievement Titan competition.

She was given the John Morton Excellence in the Teaching of Economics award in 2014, and she has been recognized in Minnesota as Journalism Educator of the Year (2014), TIES Exceptional Technology Educator (2014), JA Capstone Teacher of the Year (2012) and Economic Educator of Excellence (2012). She recently completed a Master’s in Education Entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania, and her next project is training teachers to promote teen entrepreneurship.

In addition to teaching, Martha writes curriculum and provides hands-on teacher workshops for a variety of organizations, including the College Board, the Council on Economic Education, and her own education consulting firm, NeverBore LLC. She is married to Jeff Rush, who also worked in journalism and is now a high school teacher. They have two sons, Ben and Sam.

Martha Sevetson Rush

Website: martharush.org 

Twitter: @MarthaSRush

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Beat Boredom
Beat Boredom
Martha S Rush
Paperback
$36.00 $27.00 Save $9.00
Martha S Rush:::100203

Beat Boredom

9781625311498

$36.00 $27.00 Save $9.00
Are your students bored in class?  According to research, a majority of American high school students report being bored in class and fewer than 5% claimed that they were rarely bored during a typical day in school.

Former journalist and veteran teacher Martha Rush decided this would not do for her Minnesota students. Moving beyond asking open-ended questions and making connections to their own lives, Martha began to engage her government, journalism, and economics classes in meaty discussions, competitions, simulations, and authentic work, like running a newspaper or starting a business.

Building on her more than 800 interviews with high school graduates, she offers up strategies in all subject areas for active engagement, moving way beyond traditional passive memorization of information. She describes how to create innovative experiences in your classroom, and shares her own lessons and her students’ work. Beat Boredom will help you join the ranks of teachers who have challenged the status quo and found ways to motivate even the most reluctant learners.
Beat Boredom