Throughout all the classes we participate in throughout our high school years, Ms. Kelli Orth hopes to leave a nice and warm-welcoming place for her students to the point where they can leave their thoughts and worries behind and learn interesting elements about World History.

Orth has been teaching World History and AP World History for about 13 years in total and loves her job.

“I love sitting with the students, and as they learn to read, I see this light go on. They lit up when they got something and I went home and told my husband, I like this job… I learned that I like teaching.”

As a young adult, Orth wanted to keep teaching children due to the looks on their faces when they were invested in a topic she was teaching and getting to provide this exciting information to her students.

Her inspiration came from her grandmother, who aspired to be a teacher as she got older but due to some personal issues never got the chance. Orth carries that dream for her grandmother by teaching at Verrado High School, keeping her and her grandmother’s passion alive.

She also credits her middle school World History teacher who helped make her decision for her to become the amazing teacher students claim to be.

“My middle school social studies teacher also inspired me to become a teacher and was my favorite teacher throughout my middle school years.”

Orth emphasizes the importance of engaging her students in the lessons that she teaches with the struggles that come along with teaching, such as cell phones becoming a problem in today’s society.

“The focus is more on the phones… that makes it difficult. I see a lot more students struggling with their grades because of that component in the classroom.”

She believes that cell phones are certainly becoming an issue inside the classroom and still today tries to come up with interesting ways to engage her students in her classroom such as games, projects and interesting history lessons for students to become invested in.

She enjoys the memories that she makes with each one of these students and cherishes them.
“What I love about my job is I get to know my students. I know where they’re at. I know how they feel…I love getting to know my students.” Orth adds.

She enjoys connecting with her students with different types of projects and talking to them inside and outside of school. One thing Orth hopes doesn’t change is the connection she gains with her students from teaching in-person every single day due to her point of view

“I hope in-person learning doesn’t change. I could see that I could easily go online, but guess what? The education is not the same. I worked during the pandemic. I know my students got something, but not as much as they could have gotten in class.”

She firmly believes that if we go into a world where we have to go back online as it was in 2020, we’d only be dragging ourselves backward and she would be so afraid that her students won’t reach their full potential that she hopes her students can be at.

With controversial topics in World History, she believes that they are hard to go over but at the end of the day, she doesn’t get her opinion in the way and hopes that students can be free to discuss any type of appropriate discussions that they firmly believe.

“I welcome discussion. I love to hear everyone’s opinion. Mine is irrelevant here; mine is relevant to me, and yours is relevant to your view.”

Ms. Orth is a fantastic teacher and students in her class can be sure to feel a connection within her classroom and topics on World History.