When Jace Walsh was 16, he mentioned to his father — a man who worked manual labor his whole life, sold seed, done agricultural things — that maybe he'd like to do something similar. His father was the kind of man who, as Jace put it, "only talks if it's important or funny." He went quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I didn't work this hard my whole life to give you knowledge for you to waste that."

Walsh teaches social sciences at Seneca High School now — world history, human geography, and AP Human Geography. He graduated from Seneca in 2011. One of his teachers back then was Erica Read. They're colleagues today.

Read graduated from Seneca in 1999, came back, and has been teaching here for 20 years — 22 counting two years elsewhere. She runs six courses: early childhood education 1, early childhood education 2, early childhood education administration, intro to family and consumer science, culinary, and a newly launched career practicum. The ECE program has been around since before she arrived. The practicum is new this year — her idea, developed with Walsh — and it places students in real classrooms at schools across the district.

When I asked Walsh how the program came together, he explained that he and Erica approached the administration with the idea of an educator club modeled on Ed Rising, a national program. The response from Superintendent Dan Stecken and Principal Mike Coughlin was characteristically Seneca: "We don't hate that idea — but what if we just did it our way?"

So they did.

The three juniors currently in the practicum — Audrey Claypool, Tori Skelton, and Landon Hebel — each spend part of their school day in a classroom that isn't their own.

Audrey works with 4th graders at Seneca Elementary, pulling students one-on-one during math, spelling, and reading time. She didn't expect how much detail goes into each lesson. "As a high school student, I don't think about putting a capital letter at the beginning of my sentence," she said. "But they need that reminder." After the practicum, she's headed toward elementary education — she wants the broad spectrum of subjects, not just one. She's considering Illinois State for its teaching program.

Tori works with 8th graders at the junior high — English and social studies. When they were wrapping up a poetry unit, she brought in her own middle school examples. Her path toward post-secondary English education started with a teacher named Mr. Champagne — her Honors English 1 teacher at Seneca. "He made reading Shakespeare fun, which is something that's pretty crazy," she said. "I want to have that same experience with other people." She's set on Olivet Nazarene University; her family went there, and she wants to be in that environment.

Landon works with 6th graders at Milton Pope Elementary, a small feeder school north of town. His supervising teacher there taught him when he was in 6th grade — and she's about to retire. He didn't know quite what to expect. "I thought they would kind of treat me like an outsider," he said. "But the more I've started to come, they've opened up to me and treated me like I belong there and I'm actually a teacher." He's thinking high school — he can relate to that age group better. Illinois State is on his list.

When Read was asked how many students who go through her program end up in education, she said 95 percent. Then she put it to a quick show of hands in the room. It held up. "Teaching for 22 years," she said, "and I still just wanted to make those connections." She had a teacher in high school that she wanted to be like. It was in her first few years back in the classroom that she felt it finally — that she was actually starting to do that.

Walsh felt something similar, just later. It wasn't until he was student teaching, then in his first years at Coal City, surrounded by colleagues with the same mindset, that it landed: "Oh, no. This is the right decision."

About a quarter of Seneca's current teaching staff went to school here. Some of these three students may wind up among them someday — not because they're expected to, but because the school made it easy to imagine.