Walk into Kim Davis’ seventh-grade math classes at McMurray Middle School this week, and you won’t see students toiling over workbooks filled with vexing story problems.

Instead, you’ll see kids putting their hands and their ears to the test.

All last week and this, every seventh-grader at McMurray is making polyphonous music with percussion instruments — African drums, moroccos and bells — as a way to explore the elaborate patterns that form the basis of mathematics.

Islander Geoff Johns, a professional percussionist, is introducing students to the joyful complexity of rhythm as well as different cultures, thanks to a Vashon Artists in Schools partnership with Davis.

Without leaving the classroom, Johns and the students are transported to faraway lands through the unfamiliar and exotic rhythms of Cuba, Brazil or West Africa. And in the process, they are putting math into action.

The music “is a lot about patterning,” Davis said. “The essence of all math is in discovering patterns, and that’s the same basis of this music.”

Students may not realize it, but when they slap, tap and palm their different parts, they are acting out mathematical situations, she said — for example, ratios.

“If I’m playing a pattern that is a simple time, and you’re playing a pattern that is a steady pulse every three bits of time, our patterns will come together again every six bits of time,” Johns said. “Math is a way to describe the world, and here math can describe what they’re doing.”

Students said they welcomed the opportunity to push all the desks in Davis’ classroom aside and spend their math class in a drumming circle instead.

“It’s fun because it’s something different,” said seventh-grade Emily Kruly. She’s enjoyed trying out the different instruments, she said, and she can’t pick one favorite. The best part, she added, is “the fact that we don’t have textbooks.”

Student Nathaniel Larson concurred.

“It’s a good change, a good way to learn math in a different form,” he said. “I think that the students like me are enjoying it more than just writing down assignments and doing problems because there’s a lot more creativity to it. But we’re still learning all about the rhythms and how they go together, so it’s a lot of fun.”

Collaborations such as the one between Davis and Johns are made possible by Vashon Artists in Schools, a program sponsored by Vashon Allied Arts and Vashon Island School District.

Each year since its inception in 1988, the program has brought about 25 adults into all three of Vashon’s public schools to teach classroom units as different as singing in Spanish at Vashon High School and creating copper bowls and learning the “science behind copper” at Chautauqua, said Carrie Van Buren, who directs Vashon Artists in Schools. The program has been responsible for more than 400 teacher-artist partnerships, she said, and has brought 130 local artists into Island classrooms.

Last month, Vashon Artists in Schools was awarded a $10,000 Learning in the Arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts — a gratifying endorsement as well as much-needed financial support for next year’s program.

“It’s national recognition for our little program as a very successful arts in education program that’s been working for two decades,” Van Buren said.

The partnership between Davis and Johns is “a wonderful example of arts integration into a core subject,” Van Buren said. Davis has “put a lot of effort into truly integrating the art form into math, and students are really responding to that.”

Johns — who with his wife began RhythmJoy, an African drumming and dancing group that’s a Strawberry Festival parade favorite — agreed that students are engaged in drumming.

“Most people, given the opportunity, enjoy playing drums,” he said. “I think they’re getting some sense that math isn’t completely abstract. Even in a practical counting way, math is real to them. It’s not math on a page.”

Seventh-grader Larson agreed.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in our class who doesn’t enjoy doing it,” Larson said of drumming. “We all look forward to math now.”