The leap from a small, rural town in northern Minnesota to college life is undoubtedly drastic. Woodward Academy’s AP Macroeconomics teacher Dr. Dale Stahl is personally familiar with not only that experience, but also being the first person in his family to go through college.
“I grew up in a pretty rural place in northern Minnesota,” Dr. Stahl said. “My grandparents gave some of their land to my dad to build a house right next door to them. So I grew up really close to a lot of family. My grandparents lived right next door. My dad’s uncle and cousins live right across the road from us. My great-grandparents at a place down the road, and then there were some other relatives. So we were all kind of on this same road in a township in northern Minnesota.”
Surrounded by family, Dr. Stahl played football and biked with his cousins growing up. Dr. Stahl went to school in a neighboring—if larger—town, but he said his parents didn’t often venture into the nearest city of Duluth. He cites this drive as taking about twenty minutes.
“They just always made it seem like it was a tremendous effort to leave our little road to go into town,” Dr. Stahl said. “So it was kind of an interesting upbringing from that perspective.”
However, Dr. Stahl wasn’t to remain on the little road. He was recruited for basketball to a small liberal arts college called St. Olaf in Northfield, Minnesota. There, his path towards economics began.
“I didn’t really know what I was going to do in college, but, at that time, there was a lot of emphasis on the business world,” Dr. Stahl said. “And I knew that business was something different than what my family did—some sort of marketing or management or leadership–and so I wanted to do that. The college I went to didn’t have a business degree, but it had an economics degree. And you’d get an econ degree with a business concentration. So that’s what I did.”
And so, Dr. Stahl practically stumbled into the subject of his current profession while searching for a different path in life from the one followed by the people around him growing up. College provided him with the opportunity to experience a completely new environment with a larger community, though his passion for basketball was a constant and he pursued it by playing for St Olaf’s team and helping out with coaching elsewhere. One of the most important occurrences was meeting his wife, whose job led them to Atlanta and, through Atlanta, to Woodward.
“So I got exposed to different people who came from different socioeconomic backgrounds,” said Dr. Stahl. “I met my wife in college, so it really changed the way I understood the world quite a bit, even though I didn’t really go that far away. Still in Minnesota and I could practically throw a rock back to Duluth, right?”
Now, he is pretty far away from home. Dr. Stahl also talked about what he thinks (and hopes) his class imparts to his students at Woodward Academy.
“I think …. one of the reasons my class resonates with students is because they can see how what we’re learning, you know, is playing out in the real world,” Dr. Stahl said. “And it’s also one of the reasons that I think if you understand economics, you’re always walking around in kind of a simmering rage …. I want people to hopefully be critical thinkers about the choices they make for themselves, about the policy options that are put forward by leaders and people that they’re considering voting and to understand that if you, if you have a concern for economics in your economic security and wellbeing and—for the whole nation going forward—if you understand macro, you can pick out the people whose plans make the most sense. And you can avoid picking people whose plans don’t make a lot of sense. And that doesn’t always happen. And so I keep hoping that if we get enough people who understand it, then we’ll all make better choices.”
Dr. Stahl teaches five sections of AP Macroeconomics in Woodward Academy’s Upper School and leads the Chick-fil-A Leadership program at Woodward.
Atlanta is a long distance from Dr. Stahl’s little road in Minnesota, and Dr. Stahl embraces his exploration of new places as much as he values the happy accidents that lead him to economics and to Woodward.
“I really am glad that I majored in [economics] because I think I’ve come to appreciate that economics underlies almost everything,” Dr. Stahl said. “And it’s sort of the foundation of so much that drives people’s actions and decisions and motivations. To try to figure out how to get a better opportunity in life, to try to figure out how to make decisions that will hopefully benefit you going forward, to understand why we make the choices we make. “
