For Dual Enrollment Educator Dr. Beth Rips, the path to the classroom wasn’t a straight line. But life, she’s since realized, was always leading her there.
A lifelong Omaha resident with deep roots in the community, Rips didn’t begin her career in education—at least not education in the traditional sense. Prior, she had honed her skills in another kind of craft. As a young adult, Rips spent two years as a professional baker, before opening her own cafe and bakery in Omaha
In the early 1990s, after a decade as a restaurateur, Rips decided to pursue a career change. A career assessment test told her she showed aptitude in “either teaching or counseling.
“I finally realized that what I had done for those ten years in the restaurant—was teaching,” Rips said. “I taught kids how to scoop cookie balls and bake bread, wait on customers, wash dishes, and many other things integral to the day-to-day running of the restaurant.”
With that discovery, Rips resolved to bring her knack for teaching into the classroom. Encouragement and assistance from a loyal customer—a “professor at Creighton in the education department”—helped her to bring that resolution to fruition.
“He ultimately helped me plot my course,” said Rips.
In 1994, Rips enrolled at Creighton University to pursue a Master of Arts degree in English. Degree in hand, she entered the job market and enrolled at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln (UNL) in 1997, attaining her doctorate in 2003. Her doctoral dissertation topic was “Contemporary Family Drama since World War II: Diverse Visions, Forms and Attitudes.”
“When I first started looking for jobs after grad school, many English teachers flooded the market and it was quite competitive,” Rips recalled. “I worked as a teacher aide at a Catholic grade school, because I could not find a teaching job.”
This job, at the Ursuline Academy of Dallas—a Catholic college preparatory school for girls in Texas—marked Rips’s first of two times teaching outside of Nebraska. (The other was a three-year spell teaching up the road at Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs from 2011 through 2015.)
In a career that has now spanned thirty years, Rips has taught at nearly every level and institution imaginable—at high schools, community colleges, and universities; at private prep schools and large public institutions. She’s held teaching roles at Northwest Missouri State, UNL, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the College of Saint Mary, and Metro Community College, to name a few. Today, she teaches at Millard West High School, where she leads two dual-credit English courses and a section of Honors English 10.
She began teaching advanced placement (AP) literature in 2020, having waited several years for the opportunity.
“I love AP Lit because...the students are usually seniors and most are quite well-rounded,” Rips said. “I enjoy the depth and breadth of the course, the higher-level discussions, the quality of student work, and the freedom to teach the things I love.
“I teach several works of drama in my class--because I feel drawn to it and I want to share that with students--particularly family drama like Fences Death of a Salesman, and A Raisin in the Sun among others. I teach Othello every year to expose students to Shakespeare and the psychology of what it means to be human.”
The most exciting thing about AP literature, Rips said, is the personal and intellectual growth it fosters in students.
“My students, who typically already possess strong analytical skills, use these skills as a foundation to enhance their ability to critically assess and analyze the literary elements and ideas found in the works we study,” she said. “I enjoy seeing students who, at the beginning of the year, were paralyzed at the thought of speaking in class become regular participants in discussion and develop the poise and confidence needed to thrive in our complicated world.”
When she’s not teaching, Rips is still actively engaged in her first love: baking. She also enjoys exploring new restaurants, and going on long walks with her English Setter, Margot. She’s also an avid reader of contemporary fiction and a passionate theatergoer.
She recently revisited Wolf Hall on PBS and enthusiastically recommends both the series and the Hilary Mantel trilogy on which it’s based. “The writing and acting are superb,” she said. “If you want a big reading project, reading the entire trilogy is a completely immersive experience.”
Rips—whose father “always felt that reading 19th century Russian literature should be imperative”—credits a rich reading environment at home, as well as several professors, for her development as an educator.
“They wanted to know me as a person,” she said of her teachers—an attentiveness and care she seeks to bring into her own classroom.
