Six teachers sit around a table at Vandalia's junior high. They teach different subjects, come from different backgrounds, and are spread across two floors of the building. But they run sixth grade as a unit — and the way they got here tells you everything about why it works.

Darrel Holbrook has known he wanted to teach since kindergarten. Mrs. Bowers was his teacher at Jefferson School, right here in Vandalia. He was five, didn't want his mom to leave, and something about the way Mrs. Bowers made him feel that year settled it for good.

"Kind of my calling," he says. "Just what I was meant to do."

He graduated from Vandalia in 1990. He teaches science now and has been on the sixth-grade team for almost his entire career. When he gives his students two minutes to Google a topic, he makes them think about what's real and what isn't — especially with science, where deep fakes and AI-generated images can make the extraordinary hard to distinguish from the fabricated.

Joe Kelly sits across the table. His path was different. Kelly worked for a private equity firm in St. Louis, buying and selling television stations. Then 2009 hit, and he got laid off. The next job put him in charge of an office where the biggest conflicts involved someone moving someone else's lunch in the fridge. He made what he calls "pretty in-depth calculations on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life" — and chose sixth-grade social studies. He's been teaching for 12 or 13 years now. Vandalia class of '97.

Kate Timmermann came from retail and business. She loved traveling until she didn't. Family members were teachers. She went back, got certified, and has been teaching math for 18 years. Her classroom is deliberately analog — physical textbook, paper and pencil, with problems solved at the board. The kids still love going up there, she says. The act of writing the problem down and working through it, hand to chalk, does something a screen can't.

Allison Perry is in her third year, and it shows — in the best way. A Vandalia native, class of 2015, she always wanted to teach. Her mom was a Head Start preschool teacher, and Perry used to go on off days and read to the little kids. But college rattled her confidence. She switched off the education track, graduated with an English degree, worked at a coffee shop, and then at her mom's restaurant. One day, she heard about the Golden Apple program, earned a full-ride scholarship to NIU for her master's, student-taught second grade, and landed back at Vandalia just as a veteran teacher was retiring.

"I look back, and I think about how if I hadn't changed my major my freshman year, I may not have had the opportunity to work here," she says. "It took me years to realize that it all did work out, even if at the time it didn't feel like it was working out for me."

She teaches language arts and grammar. She's the one who assigned a completion-grade assignment after Christmas break and then had to share a personal story about missing a deadline as an adult — because half the class didn't finish it. That's sixth grade: teaching the skill behind the skill.

Carrie Whitten teaches literature. Vandalia class of '92. She lived in the Chicago area and worked in office furniture space planning before kids brought the family back home. There were no jobs in her field in Vandalia, so she started subbing, went back for her master's, and has been teaching for 12 years. Her reading list tells you something about her ambition: The War That Saved My Life, the graphic novel New Kid, the nonfiction account All Thirteen — about the Thai soccer team trapped in the cave — and The Crossover, a novel written in verse. Right now, her students are comparing the All Thirteen book to the documentary.

Cyndi Zobrist is the team's special education teacher, and at 29 years, its longest-serving member. She's from Highland. She always wanted to teach — used to line her cousins up in chairs and play school. A full-ride state scholarship steered her into special ed. She didn't plan on Vandalia or on sixth grade, but a position opened suddenly, and she took it. She stayed because of the team.

Zobrist works across classrooms — inclusion in Perry's language arts, Kelly's social studies — and maintains her own instructional periods for students with IEPs. She's watched special education evolve from isolation to integration. "It's not like it was before," she says, "where you had special ed kids who were just in their own classroom." Some parents still hesitate, carrying old stigmas. But the model has changed.

She's also the one who, mid-interview, affirms Perry's growth as a teacher — a veteran of nearly three decades telling a third-year colleague she can see how far she's come. Perry lights up. "I love having her in my room," she says. "I wish I could always have a veteran teacher in my room for my first five years."

That's the engine. Four of the six are Vandalia graduates. Three are second-career teachers. They're split across two floors and communicate constantly — if something happens with a student in first hour, every teacher on the team knows before second hour starts.

"We don't even realize it sometimes," Holbrook says. "But as we're putting things together, we realize who's doing this, who's doing that, who has the best insight."

Five sections. Eighteen to twenty-two kids each. The first year of rotating classes. The year the math gets real, the reading list gets serious, and the deadline becomes a life skill.

These six make it work — not because they were assigned to the same hallway, but because they chose this work, most of them more than once, and they keep choosing it every day.