Last year, Mr. Kline was voted as the Junior class’s favorite teacher. APUSH, a class Mr. Kline teaches, stands for Advanced Placement U.S. History is a two-semester college level course for juniors. It focuses on American history between 1491 to the present day divided into nine units with debates and chapter breakdowns.
Andrew Koval, a junior, is in Mr. Kline’s APUSH class and “enjoys how enthusiastic Mr. Kline is about teaching” and took the class mainly to take one of his classes again. Andrew is not a fan of the weird schedules with the lab periods, but he would recommend the class to people who want to be challenged. He found out about APUSH through a current Senior, Cashlin Dietrich, who took his class last year.
Mr. Kline chose to become a teacher because he loves seeing students grow and retain information, and he genuinely enjoys working with kids. He loves the content and is always baffled at “how 20 students are hooked on my every word on the American Revolution – even down to their spell-bound expressions.”
Mr. Kline got his bachelor’s degree at Albright College for being a history major and a secondary education minor. He also has two master’s degrees: one from Wilkes University for 21st Century Teaching and Learning, and the other for North American History from Arizona State University, which truly makes him a historian. He enjoys teaching APUSH because of how high-stress the class is and how there is a major test at the end that truly grades how well he did as a teacher, yet he feels the class is too fast and many topics get skipped. Mr. Kline’s lessons are all about students truly learning information and not memorizing it, and he incorporates debates and interactive activities because “standardized testing is not what education should be about.” His favorite events he provides as lessons for his APUSH students are the Constitutional Convention event, the Kline Cup event, and the Speakeasy at the end of the year.
If Mr. Kline could have dinner with any historical figure, he would have dinner with Abraham Lincoln, because he wants to know how he thought through his decisions, and Mr. Kline believes that Abraham Lincoln was the best American President. Mr. Kline’s classes clear up tons of misconceptions students have from their previous classes, or what they have read online, and one of his favorite misconceptions is clearing up that the Civil war was not fought for slavery, but for states rights, it just happened to also support the end of slavery, too. Another misconception he loves clearing up is teaching students that women were truly treated horribly in the past and even still to an extent in today’s world.
He also loves discussing American exceptionalism, and how America was not always correct, but not always wrong either. When students seem sleepy at any point in the week, Mr. Kline typically tells them “why are you all tired? You all need to start drinking coffee!” to which he says that his favorite brand of coffee, the only coffee he will drink, is Four Monkeys coffee from Kutztown.
For more information on APUSH, visit the program of studies on the school website.
