Jenna Higginbotham, the new sixth-grade teacher at Iola Middle School, may contain in her person the genetic secret to being a great teacher: She likely picked up from her mother, a longtime employee at the Department of Children and Families, a focused capacity for helping kids. And from her father — the knack for keeping them in line. “My dad, he was the warden at Hutchinson Correctional Facility,” explained Higginbotham.
But whatever her lineal gifts, the fervor for teaching is hers alone. Higginbotham grew up in Buhler, the middle of three children, and cannot recall ever wanting to do anything else. “I would play teacher in my bedroom when I was little, pretending to teach all my stuffed animals. It’s just always been my thing.”
From there, her career ambitions never wavered.
And it was probably this confidence of purpose that propelled Higginbotham through Ottawa University at a rate that saw her graduating from college around the time that most of her classmates were only just finding their feet.
“I did the fast-track,” recalls Higginbotham. “I never took breaks. I did college all through summer and everything. I couldn’t wait to get to the real world.”
And now?
“And now I’m like: Why!” laughs Higginbotham, “I should have stayed in college longer!”
But her get-up-and-go didn’t pass unnoticed. Higginbotham graduated in December of 2007 and was offered a job in Ottawa the following month.
She’s been teaching ever since: in Ottawa, in Garnett, and, most recently, in Chanute.
The 30-year-old hopes to have found a longer-term home in Iola, though. Her husband John — the assistant technical director at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center — is an Iola native, and it’s where the pair plan to raise their three children, the youngest of which is only 10 weeks old.
This will be Higginbotham’s first year teaching middle schoolers. She is licensed to teach K-6, and has in years past taught only elementary-aged children. Her class sizes at Iola range from 11 to 21 pupils, and her focus is Language Arts. Which is a passion.
“I love to read,” says Higginbotham. “My main thing whenever I teach reading is to get the students to love reading. There are so many who don’t. I told them on the first day that my goal is to make you love reading a little bit more each day.”
Higginbotham has seen the power a book has to transform a class. For kids with limited experience of the world, a book can be, says Higginbotham, a tiny window onto a wider human landscape. One of her favorite books to teach is June Rae Wood’s “The Man Who Loved Clowns.”
“It’s about a man, Punky, who has Down’s syndrome,” explains Higginbotham. The book is told through the eyes of Punky’s 13-year-old niece, who, while she loves her uncle, finds herself embarrassed by him as she tries to make a life for herself at a new school.
“Punky ends up dying at the end of the book,” says Higginbotham. “The kids I’ve read that to, they really, really connect with him. And they learn to accept him and accept his differences.”
But Higginbotham refuses to let the feelings of compassion engendered in her classes dissolve without testing those sympathies against the sometimes harsh angles of the real world. In her last post, the teacher forged a relationship with Tri-Valley Developmental Services in Chanute. Tri-Valley provides social services for the region’s developmentally disabled population, many of which, like Punky, have Down’s syndrome. “After reading that book, we then connected with Tri-Valley and they would come into our classroom and we would be partners for the year and do fun things together. They would come on a bus and we would do a craft or tours of the school or just talk and get to know each other’s hobbies.
“Suddenly all this from the book would apply to the kiddos’ real lives,” reflected Higginbotham. “It really taught the kids to accept difference. Because kids at that age are really nervous to talk to somebody who is different. They would always get shy and be really wary. And then they would meet each other. They would play. And then it was fine, it was great.”
New IMS teacher realizes life’s ambition
