She challenged students, society

Lore May Rasmussen, 88, formerly of Miquon, a civil-rights champion and an educator who developed an innovative method for teaching math, died of heart failure Jan. 23 at her home in Berkeley, Calif.

In 1956, Mrs. Rasmussen joined the Miquon School faculty when her husband, Donald, was appointed principal. She discovered that mathematics bored many of the most creative students at the private elementary school in Whitemarsh Township. Dispensing with rote memorization and using visual aids such as pieces of wood, nails and rubber bands, she soon had students excited about decimals and fractions.

Eventually her 10-year-old pupils were working algebraic equations normally reserved for ninth graders. Mrs. Rasmussen developed a series of workbooks and teaching guides, and Reader's Digest published an article about her work in 1961.

She left Miquon in 1963 to work with children in Philadelphia. She became a consultant for the Philadelphia School District, and by 1965 was director of the district's Learning Center, where she created math labs and trained teachers. In 1976, she received an award from the Citizens Committee on Public Education. She left the Philadelphia district in 1978.

In the summers of 1983 and 1984 she organized workshops in Beijing to introduce her methods to Chinese teachers.

A native of Lampertheim, Germany, Mrs. Rasmussen fled the Nazi persecution of Jews in 1938 and joined her older sister, Erna, in New York City. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois, where she met her future husband. They married in 1940.

In 1942, the Rasmussens moved to Talladega, Ala., and joined the faculty of Talladega College, a historically black school. Two months later, the white couple drove 60 miles to Birmingham to shop and joined an African American friend for dinner in a restaurant they had been told would accept black patrons. The information was incorrect, and the Rasmussens were jailed. They were released in the early morning and eventually fined $25 for disorderly conduct.

Years later, the couple recounted the harrowing experience for the documentary

From Swastika to Jim Crow

. The film, which PBS aired in 2001, explored the lives of Jewish German scholars who taught at historically black colleges.

Mrs. Rasmussen wrote about encountering prejudice when she tried to travel in the South with her students and the desperate poverty of black families she tried to help in Talladega.

For several summers, she and her husband directed the Circle Pines Center, an interracial cooperative family camp in Michigan.

The Rasmussens remained at Talladega College until moving to Miquon. Mrs. Rasmussen's switch to the inner city in 1963 was prompted by her shock over the bombing that killed four black girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that year, her husband said.

In 1986, the Rasmussens moved to Berkeley, where two of their sons were living.

Though she often had to use a wheelchair in recent years, Mrs. Rasmussen participated in a demonstration against the closing of a hospital in Oakland, Calif., and demonstrated against the war in Iraq, her son Peter said.

In addition to her husband, son and sister, Mrs. Rasmussen is survived by sons David and Steven; a brother; nine grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

A memorial celebration will be held at 2 p.m. June 27 at the Miquon School, 2025 Harts Lane.

Memorial donations may be made to school, Conshohocken, Pa. 19428.