Creative thinking molds teacher

Once upon a time, when Karen Graham was in high school, she got mired in a math problem and couldn’t find her way toward the answer.
The teacher looked at Karen. Karen looked at the teacher. And then the teacher began to sing.
“Opera style,” remembers Graham. “Instead of talking me through the lesson, she suddenly sang the whole thing. Somehow, at that moment, though, everything about the problem clicked, and I just thought ‘I love you. You are so cool.’”
The incident imprinted on Graham’s brain not only the lineaments of a difficult equation but also the method by which it was imparted.
Graham, one of two new third-grade teachers at Lincoln Elementary, has successfully adapted similar techniques in her own teaching over the course of her 15-year career.
“I do a lot of singing and chants and things. We get up and move,” says Graham. “If ever I have kids that are stuck, a lot of times physical action will help. And I love it, because kids who get stuck are like ‘Oh, we can look at this a different way?’ And that’s what I want. I don’t want them growing up thinking ‘I can’t do this, I’m not smart.’ Because that’s not it. Everyone’s capable. But we each may need to travel a different route.”
When Graham began her odyssey of “active teaching” — she’s worked in schools from Garden City to Chanute — she was tapping, intuitively, into a then-developing pedagogy known as “whole brain learning,” which seeks to engage the student’s full participation, body and mind, in the subject under study.
“It’s something I stumbled across before I knew it was an actual teaching method,” says Graham.
“So we’ll sing or chant or be ninjas or move around — whatever helps. It’s just these little things that I’ve learned over the years.”
Ninjas?
“Yeah, we learned fractions using ninja moves,” says Graham of her previous years’ classes. “They were having a hard time turning a whole number into a fraction, so we did something like this.” Graham morphs briefly into a martial artist, extending one arm in front of her body and drawing the other, slowly, like a bow, back toward her ear and saying “Whooole numbah?” She pauses for a second, then uncoils a punch that slices through the air, and shouts “kee-ya — denominator!”
At her last position, as a fifth-grade teacher in tiny Bronaugh, Mo., her method of teaching through song was so successful that during the state-administered tests, observers could hear a chorus of Graham’s students, bent over their papers, lightly humming to themselves the soundtrack to that semester’s lessons. (There was the occasional child, too, caught tracing karate moves in the air as he approached the math section.)

GOOD teachers have a better grip on the guide rope leading back to childhood than do the rest of us. Where most of our memories get snagged in the concentration of life-events in our teens and twenties — love,  career, marriage, children — a sensitive third-grade teacher can look out across her classroom, see a shy girl seated at her desk, and remember precisely when she was that girl.
The 37-year-old Graham is a master of this sort of fierce empathy when it comes to the children in her classes, and can send her mind back three decades in a flash. “Here is my biggest thing, period: Every child has the right and privilege to be here. No one should be allowed to take that feeling of safety away from them. I remember what it can be like, and I’m serious about protecting that safe space in the class.”
Graham recalls another inspiring high school teacher — an art teacher this time — in her hometown of Olathe (Graham now lives in Uniontown with her husband and three daughters). Mr. Carter invoked for Graham what must be a teacher’s primary virtue: Patience.
“He was so wonderful. So understanding.” Graham, a self-diagnosed “klutz,” recalls a potentially gory mishap when, experimenting with a band saw, she “accidentally popped the blade out of the casing and it went flying across the room.
“But he wasn’t upset. He knew it was an accident.” He did move Graham’s desk next to his for the rest of the semester, however. “But he never made me feel bad for it. And I’ve taken that into my classroom here.”
Because the lesson applies to Iola’s third-graders, too. “There are kids that will do the same thing wrong over and over again, but you can’t get mad at them,” said Graham, who is herself a queen of the even keel. “I mean, these are third-graders. They’ve only been talking in sentences for six years. They’ve only been walking for seven — and only for six without running into walls. You have to put it in perspective. Yeah, it might be easy for you or me. But how many years have we been doing it? These guys are just starting out.”
Graham was offered a scholarship to attend art school after high school. And her drama teacher there thought Graham had a future in the theater. “But I had to say no. I can use that stuff in the classroom. I wanted to use my art and my drawing and my singing and pull it all in. I just look at all the interests I have and want to build them into the classroom. I’m always asking ‘How can we use these things here?’”
For Graham, it’s a question with a long history. “My mom used to keep one of those record books, with pages that say ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and has the year beside it. We were looking at mine. From kindergarten up, it always said ‘teacher.’ Sometimes ‘vet,’ sometimes ‘nurse.’ Sometimes it was ‘actress.’ But ‘teacher’ was there every single year.
“I lucked out.”