Bella McManus
Chinook Writer
The Education Department at Casper College will miss Kerri Mahlum as she wraps up her last semester at the college. The education instructor is retiring after teaching at CC since 2001.
Photo Courtesy of Kerri Mahlum
Kerri Mahlum, retiring education instructor, is pictured in her office.
Mahlum’s textbook, “Positive Guidance for Young Children: A Proactive Approach” is coming out in January after being in progress for three years. Mahlum is in remission after receiving a cancer diagnosis two years ago, when she took a break from writing to get better. She said via email that she gave feedback on other textbooks and was asked by the publisher to write a textbook of her own with her specific interest.
“I’ve always been passionate about helping children grow into great adults,” she said in her email, “and I think the best way to do that is to help them learn to be kind to themselves and others.”
Mahlum was a student at CC before transferring to Union College for her bachelor’s, and then to University of Nebraska-Lincoln for her master’s. She moved back to Casper and taught elementary school until an adjunct position opened up for an intro to early childhood class, which she ended up teaching once a semester until the head of department retired and she took over the role.
Mahlum said she was struck by how many similarities there were between her elementary school students and her college students.
“People are people, you know? Kids get bored. Adults get bored,” she said.
She said she used many of the same strategies on both children and adults by engaging her students, exciting them, and giving them things to do with their hands.
Mahlum said, “Plus, teaching in the education department — I wanted to make sure I was teaching my classes in a way that students would know that’s how they need to teach children. I wanted to model that. So, I wanted to be a really good teacher.”
The Director of the Early Childhood Learning Center at CC, Emily Calmes, who was a student of Mahlum’s, said that her personality, kindness, and willingness to be human stood out to her most.
“She’s an instructor who is just so relatable…. She makes it feel like you’ve just known her forever,” Calmes said.
Calmes started as a nursing student with Mahlum as her advisor before she switched majors to early childhood. She went on to get her masters in innovative early childhood from the University of Colorado, working in the ECLC the whole time.
“So, she’s seen a lot of me in the last 20 years,” Calmes said about Mahlum.
Calmes fondly thinks of how Mahlum calls her open-toed shoes “prison shoes,” and had told Calmes when she was a student teacher that if she didn’t buy “real shoes” then she would fail her class.
“So I got a pair of close-toed shoes to wear just for student teaching and have not worn them since,” Calmes laughed.
Mahlum said she is immensely proud of Calmes and all that she’s accomplished, saying that she continued to grow throughout the years and became an amazing leader in early childhood.
While Mahlum is sad at the thought of the college losing “institutional memory” after she leaves, stating that she has things she remembers that the current staff could benefit from learning, she is truly looking forward to “goofing off.”
Mahlum took her cancer diagnosis as an opportunity to reevaluate her life, making the decision to plan her retirement this year. She said she always works hard and plays hard, and she is looking forward to sleeping in, making bread, playing with her dogs, and traveling.
She planned a week in London and hopes to one day go to Egypt to explore her more unspoken interest in Egyptology.
She said that she will adjunct for classes at CC or the University of Wyoming if asked, because she loves teaching too much and doesn’t expect to ever stop.
Something Mahlum said she would tell her younger self just starting at CC is to always put the students first, and she feels she lived up to this advice very well.
“I know that’s a cheesy phrase,” she said. “But I do think that’s the thing I did well — when I made decisions, it was based on what’s going to be best for my students.”
Calmes said that Mahlum truly led by example and shared such a passion for what she does that it is hard to imagine what the early childhood department will look like without her presence. While Mahlum is expecting, and hoping for, a quiet leave in December, Calmes said too many people love her too much for that to happen.
