For Susan Nolan, teaching kindergarten is a vocation, a calling that she’s honored for many years at Benton Grade School. Nolan’s vocation was inspired by her own mother. She was also a teacher and someone Susan admired and from whom she learned a great deal. In a real sense, teaching is a family tradition, one that stretches through Benton and into the lives of numerous youngsters in the community. Nolan reminisces about summers spent helping her mother prepare her classroom for a new semester, new faces, new challenges and opportunities:

“My mother taught at Benton Grade School. She was quite the motivation for me. She was a wonderful teacher. She taught kindergarten. But she also taught third grade. And I have a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Your mom was my favorite teacher. And I remember that she was so loving and read us stories,’ and they would tell me things about her. And I would go in during the summers and help her get stuff ready. And she probably was one of my reasons for going into education.”

While those are big shoes to fill, Susan took up the challenge and continued the family tradition of teaching. It’s a wonderful thing to have someone to look up to, in this case, one’s own mother. After teaching third grade herself, Susan decided to go back to teaching the younger students, where she felt she most belonged, shaping them from early on. When asked about this, Nolan warmly notes, “My heart is with the little ones.” It’s wonderful to know that these small students have such a presence in their lives, busy teaching and truly caring for them.

Nolan is in her last several years of teaching at Benton, and she’s finishing strong: her own grandson will be
in her class, a grace note in a long song of service and education. While many of us have lost ourselves in other fields and disciplines, there is something about teaching, for Susan, that is irreplaceable. It might even be sacred. There is something, too, about working with the young, the very young, when they are just sprouting and beginning to bud. Like a wise gardener, Nolan knows how to prune and attend to them. When asked

about the choice of teaching versus other careers, she doesn’t mince words. She might even convince someone later in life to change their path for the better:

“I would tell them that they have the opportunity to touch so many lives, and to make a difference. And one of the things I love about kindergarten is that you get to introduce them to the world of learning, but you also get to take the [temporary] place of their caregiver, their parents, to be a surrogate of sorts,
where you get to foster the love of learning for them. And that’s the main goal for kindergarten: I want them to be lifelong learners. And that starts in kindergarten.”

Habits are easier to form when young. With folks like Susan forming and shaping these kids, we know all is not lost; in fact, things are good. While she has formed a habit of teaching over a lifetime of service and dedication, Nolan applies her lessons with love and tenderness. But she’s still not finished advocating for education in general. For anyone willing to listen, Nolan knows there is a true reason to go into teaching:

“I would encourage them to take a leap of faith to go into education, because it can be so rewarding to see all the lives that you can touch and that you can make a difference by being there by loving them.”

This calling isn’t just for ourselves, but for those around us. Susan knows what she’s talking about, and again and again, it comes from a deep place of love, a place to which she has devoted her life.