Unorthodox history teacher wins fellowship

Unorthodox history teacher wins fellowship

(AP) — Katie Klaus's junior history class just voted Hitler for U.S. president.

[...] they didn't know they were voting for him.

Jones, Klaus describes, is one of four candidates running for U.S. president in a hypothetical 2050 election.

"This was the 1932 election in Germany," Klaus announced to her class after counting the votes.

The James Madison Fellowship Award is given to one Washington teacher each year, and Klaus is the second Woodland teacher to claim the award since Sharon Conditt earned it in 2009.

Klaus said she'll most likely get her degree through a part-time online program at private Ashland University in Ohio.

Like when she lectured on psychology for 60 minutes in a British accent, taught a lesson in social psychology by playing the movie "Mean Girls" or had her history students play "rock, paper, scissors" to demonstrate how economic systems operate.

While other students struggled, Klaus aced her classes at Ridgefield High School, then at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where she got her bachelor's in history teaching with a minor in Spanish (she's fluent and teaches English as a second language at Woodland High).

Klaus particularly loves studying the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, an emphasis of the James Madison Fellowship.

Klaus said history, if underappreciated at times, has often been characterized as the boring subject, and it's been marginalized by a national focus on the core subjects of reading and writing, math and science.