Korin Beckham
Ms. Korin is delighted to join the learners at The Nature School. This project has been a perfect opportunity to share her love of art and all things creating with an amazing group of smallish people who bring their best sense of wonder and delight to the table. Wednesdays have officially become the best day of the week.
Once long ago, Korin graduated from a normal liberal arts collage-y place with a degree in philosophy and history with a year abroad that culminated in an amazing art history project about St Francis and his historical impact on the content and style of nativity paintings.
Although this is her first formal (don’t be fooled, our art is not really that formal at all) school teaching experience, Ms Korin has been teaching from the very beginning as the oldest of five in a dedicated unschooling/homeschool family. It was an honor and a delight at age fourteen to teach her baby brother to read. She still gets chills thinking about those lessons. In high school she also taught children’s theater classes for the local homeschool theater company in addition to designing and painting sets and running the lighting department for many shows.
Throughout college she volunteered in the Deaf & Hard of Hearing preschool classroom for three years, highlights included working with the teachers to figure out how to teach eight tiny deaf people to call 911 effectively - this included a lot of role-playing and Korin lying on the floor with various “injuries”. Those summers she also worked in the Event Planning department for the Kansas City Zoo, yes you do get your own golf cart, enjoyed daily lunch with the Meerkats and once got to wear an orphaned baby Wallaby in a backpack “pouch” on her stomach for an afternoon.
Professionally Ms. Korin is a writer, director of Documentary TV with most of her experience working with the amazing team at National Geographic Television. She embraced and sweated through the opportunity to travel the world while researching amazing topics and interviewing the most incredible experts. Highlights include: spending two weeks with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Team in the Darien jungle to capture and rescue endangered frog species, using X-ray technology to study python digestion abilities, and generally ruining at least three pairs of boots a year. She also once was the keeper of the actual keys to the Step pyramid for a whole afternoon.
Personally, Ms Korin loves to make all the things. She sometimes paints on canvas with acrylics, makes crepe paper flowers, dabbles in textile dying and is hoping to try natural dyes from her own garden next summer and has painted a mural in almost every place she has lived. Her latest and most important recent project has been caring for her own two daughters Max and Inara who are growing into the best challenge she has yet encountered.