When Payton Bearden interviewed for her first teaching job at Monmouth-Roseville High School, some of the faces around the table were remarkably familiar. Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Jennings were not simply prospective colleagues, but Bearden's own former teachers. Jennings, in fact, was one of the reasons Bearden was sitting there at all. Bearden had taken Algebra II, precalculus, trigonometry, and calculus from Jennings as a Monmouth-Roseville student, and somewhere during those three years, math became more than a subject she was good at.

"I really fell in love with math," Bearden said. "Her class was, like, my favorite class of the day."

Years later, Jennings saw that the high school had a math opening and sent her former student a Facebook message: "We have an opening. You should apply." Bearden did. Now, just six years after graduating from Monmouth-Roseville in 2020, she is teaching Algebra I and Geometry in the same high school.

She isn't the only new math teacher who already knew the hallways. Derek Chandler graduated from Monmouth-Roseville in 2022, attended Monmouth College, played football there, and earned his degree in math education with a physical education endorsement. He had already been coaching baseball in the district and added basketball coaching during his senior year of college. District leaders encouraged him to do his student teaching at Monmouth-Roseville last spring, with the possibility that something permanent might follow.

It did. This year, Chandler teaches Geometry and Algebra I alongside Bearden. Two Monmouth-Roseville graduates and one math department now benefiting from students it helped produce.

For Bearden, the journey included two years at Carl Sandburg College before transferring to Northern Illinois University. As a first-generation college student, the opportunity to begin locally made higher education more accessible. At Sandburg, calculus professor Tony Paris reinforced what Jennings had started, and Bearden began tutoring calculus, discovering how much she enjoyed helping someone else understand it. At NIU, she and other students even helped create a Women in Math club to encourage more women to pursue the subject. Then she came home. Chandler never went far to begin with. Monmouth College allowed him to continue his education, athletics, and relationships in the same community where he had grown up.

Now both are trying to change something about the way students think about math. Bearden has heard the familiar reactions countless times, from "I could never do that," to "That sounds like a nightmare." She rejects the premise.

"Everyone can do math," she said. "You just have to try at it."

That matters because the value of mathematics extends far beyond students planning to attend college or pursue careers in engineering, science, or finance. Chandler hears it from farmers. Once they learn he teaches math, some tell him they wish they had paid more attention in school, since farming requires calculations, measurements, and figuring capacities such as how much grain will fit into a bin. The same is true in the trades, where a welder needs precise measurements, and anyone who eventually opens a business needs to understand costs, pricing, and finances.

"You end up using math a lot more than you think," Chandler said.

But Bearden sees an even larger purpose.

"We're not just building people who can do math," she said. "We're building problem-solving skills."

Students learn to think critically. They encounter a problem, determine what they know, identify what they need, and work toward a solution, and when the first approach fails, they try another. That ability travels remarkably well beyond a math classroom. Even in an age when artificial intelligence can produce an answer almost instantly, Chandler believes the process still matters; a student might use technology to get help with a step, but eventually that student has to demonstrate understanding. Math exposes the difference between possessing an answer and knowing how to arrive at one, and that is what these two young teachers hope to cultivate.

There is something fitting about Monmouth-Roseville entrusting that work to two of its own graduates. Chandler describes Monmouth as a tight-knit place where he can encounter people who know him even when he doesn't immediately recognize them, joking that he'll run into someone who knows his parents from 1995. Bearden spent three years away in DeKalb while attending NIU, and coming home felt different immediately.

"It was just a comforting feeling," she said.

She could go to the grocery store and see people she had known her whole life. Her interview was filled with familiar faces, and one of those faces belonged to the teacher who had helped Bearden discover what she wanted to become. Mrs. Jennings once taught Payton Bearden math, then encouraged her to go learn more of it, and eventually invited her back.

Now another student is sitting in a Monmouth-Roseville math classroom, perhaps believing that some people are simply born "math people" and others are not. Bearden and Chandler have a different message: you can learn this, you can solve this, keep working, there is a way through.

And someday, perhaps, one of those students will find a reason to come back, too.