Heather Bookstaver showed up for her interview carrying a piece of string art — a Du Quoin logo she'd made by hand, her first attempt at the medium, intended for a former student who is now a school board member.

"All of anybody that's been in my class ever is mine," she says. "They will forever be mine."

She lists them without hesitation: Collin Dorsey, a newscaster in Ohio. Teachers. Police officers. Models. Cosplay costume makers. Thirty-three years of third and fourth graders, spread across every kind of life imaginable.

She is currently in her third round of ovarian cancer. She is on FMLA through the end of the year, at which point she plans to retire. She came in smiling.

"We're kicking it out," she says. "Yeah."

Heather grew up in a family of educators — mom taught first grade, dad taught eighth-grade science, and stepfather was a guidance counselor at the high school. Her parents tried to talk her out of teaching. They were strong in the union and didn't want her to "fight that fight."

"I was called," she says. "I absolutely could not ignore that."

She prayed every year that the students who needed her most would end up on her class list.

Stephanie Day knew she wanted to teach from the time she was in elementary school, though she'll tell you she was anything but a model student.

"I was not a good student," she says. "I didn't take it seriously."

But she had a curiosity about the kids in the white portable buildings at the edge of campus — the ones in special education who were kept separate, whom the other students rarely saw.

"I just always had a soft spot," she says. "I was like, what are they doing? What do they think?"

That curiosity became a career. After four years in Elverado and twenty-nine at Du Quoin, she retired from a third and fourth-grade self-contained special education classroom. Her students learned at different speeds, in different ways, with different carrots that had to be found and offered. And they remembered.

One girl, placed in Stephanie's room in sixth grade because she didn't respond well to male teachers, came in with her arms crossed. Stephanie laid it out plainly: "We could be best friends, or we could be enemies."

She clicked. Years later, she invited Stephanie to her CNA pinning ceremony. She still remembers Stephanie's birthday.

"They pay attention," Stephanie says, "when you think they're not."

Her own middle daughter struggled with college before finding her footing. She is now a special ed teacher at Du Quoin High School.

Kathy Pfeiffer's path to the classroom was the longest. She worked in cost accounting at Turco. Managed a bank branch on Washington Street for fourteen years — until the bank sold four times in four years and she lost the ability to actually help the people she knew. She watched that, and she thought about the workers at Turco who couldn't read their own time cards. The people at the bank whose checkbooks were disasters.

On the way to Disney World with her kids, she stopped at John A. Logan, had her transcript run, and signed up for classes. Then she went to Disney.

She came back, opted out of the bank, and started over in her 40s — kids in sports, studying until one or two in the morning, up again at six. She made good grades. The bug bit her. Twenty-three and a half years later, she is still in the classroom — currently teaching life science and horticulture, running a school greenhouse and garden alongside a colleague, canning salsa and spaghetti sauce from the harvest to share with students each quarter. She learned to can from her mother, who was in her eighties and had to be summoned to the garage to teach her.

Kathy and Stephanie's oldest daughters were in each other's weddings. Were roommates in pharmacy school. Their combined service, along with Heather's and that of Joyce Beckham — Kathy's sister and a third-grade teacher who was absent the day of interviews — approaches a century.

"I'm not gonna pick a door that's been closed," Stephanie says of leaving.

She doesn't look back when she says it.