LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Gearing up for the last weeks of the school year at Louisville’s Atherton High School, students in Benjamin Molberger’s math class are working together to prepare for an upcoming exam. Molberger walks around, checking to make sure the students understand the concepts. It’s one reason he is a finalist for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
“I have a lot of knowledge but there’s always more I could learn to do better and I’m always open to wanting to do better,” Molberger said.
He says he has desire to keep learning.
“Sometimes that’s from other teachers, selling out other professional development opportunities and sometimes that’s from my students,” Molberger said.
It was that desire to keep learning that caught the attention of principal Stephanie Fluhr.
“I think he’s extremely invested in his craft. He wants to grow. He wants to learn as well. So I think it’s a lot easier to be a great teacher when you’re also continuing to be a student,” Fluhr said.
The Presidential Award is the highest honor given to STEM teachers helping students from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
This is the second time Molberger has been nominated for the award.
His students praise him for making tough courses easy to understand.
“He makes concepts that would otherwise be impossible to understand super tangible and they feel, like, really in reach,” Ethan said.
Ethan says the class will have a lasting impact on his future career.
“It’s opened my eyes to how calculus can be in all of our lives and it’s sort of present in occupations that I want to pursue.”
Molberger believes his openness to various types of learning and thinking makes him a standout teacher.
“Let students access math the way their mind more naturally thinks about it makes anything more accessible,” Molberger said.
He added, “For me, it really comes down to how can we relate this to things that you’ve seen before. The more we can connect to your prior learning, the easier it’s going to be to build new ideas.”
Three other Kentucky educators have been nominated for the Presidential Award along with Molberger.
The other teachers are math teacher, Marcus Blankeney at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, South Warren High School’s Matthew Bryant in Bowling Green and Madisonville North Hopkins’ Brian Welch in Hopkins County were all honored. Bryant and Welch are science teachers.
One hundred and eight teachers across 50 states were given the award.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) puts together a national committee to review state finalists. The committee then recommends up to two finalists from each state to receive the award.
Winners of the Presidential Award receive a certificate signed by President Joe Biden, $10,000 from NSF and an all-expenses paid trip to the award ceremony in Washington, D.C. The exact date of when the finalists are announced hasn’t been determined.