Jennifer Harsy gave this interview on her last day of work in Tennessee.

Before the call, she had driven to school early, the way she always does — which meant she was there for the sunrise. The school where she has taught for the past several years has a road running between the middle and high school buildings that her colleagues call the boulevard. Rolling hills at the end. Trees on either side.

"The sun was kind of peeking up over the trees," she said. "I was like — last time to see this. Last time for this sunrise."

And then: "I'm going home."

This fall, Jennifer Harsy joins Du Quoin Middle School as a seventh-grade science teacher, returning to the community where she graduated in 1991. She has been teaching for more than 30 years — 31, she admits, though she usually just says 30 with a plus sign after it.

 

The road between Du Quoin and this moment has stretched through Tamaroa, Pinckneyville, Tucson, and Jackson, Tennessee, and it has taken her through more classrooms, more students, and more chapters than she fully expected when she started.

She began at Tamaroa in 1995, teaching third and fourth grade for 11 years. She moved to Pinckneyville's District 50 for another 11 years of third grade before her husband Steve accepted a position in Tucson through a close family friend. Arizona lasted less than a year — the friend passed away, circumstances shifted — and by 2018, they were settled in Jackson, Tennessee, where she taught fourth grade, then fifth, then sixth-grade science, and now would have moved to seventh.

"I keep moving on," she said with a laugh. "I'm gonna be in seventh grade now."

Moving back wasn't the original plan. Retirement was the destination she and Steve had mapped out together — eventual, unhurried. Steve found an opportunity closer to family. What was supposed to happen in a decade happened this spring instead.

"I was thinking more like after we both retired," she said. "But we just got a ten-year jump start on that."

Since October, she has been making the drive back to Tennessee every weekend — working through the week, coming home on the weekend, then doing it again. The house in Jackson still needs to be readied for sale. Things are still in transit. But the direction is clear.

Seventh grade suits her. She's not surprised by this.

"They definitely understand sarcasm," she said of middle schoolers — and the experts who warn against using it in the classroom, she noted, have clearly never tried it. They're dramatic, sharp, unpredictable, and genuinely funny.

She came to teaching the way a lot of good teachers do: sideways. She was half a semester into a pre-optometry track at SEMO in Cape Girardeau when she looked at the science requirements stretching ahead and thought, I don't want to go this deep into things. Education, she decided, was the right path. Her mother had run an in-home daycare her entire childhood — she had always been around kids — and the classroom felt like a natural extension of that.

It runs in the family now. Her older daughter recently completed a master's in education after pivoting from a meteorology degree from Mississippi State — seven months after graduating, she decided to teach instead, went back to school, lived at home to pay off loans, and is now a seventh-grade science teacher herself at a school near Jackson. Mother and daughter: both seventh-grade science teachers at the same time.

"We have a lot of teachers in this family," Jennifer said.

When she talks about Du Quoin itself, she doesn't reach for a polished description. She reaches for the truth of the place.

"Just a little town," she said. "Everybody was friends. No uppity ups. You go to the ball games, and you cheer everybody on, no matter what. It's not just school spirit — it just runs over into the whole town."

Her father worked at Kroger for his whole career. Hers was a hardworking family and Du Quoin has always been that kind of town. She found after years of living elsewhere, it is not universal.

The Walmart in Du Quoin, she noted, takes an hour and a half if you're actually trying to get through it. You're going to see everybody you know.

She can't wait.