James Sanders has put his papers in for retirement. After twenty-eight years teaching math at Vandalia, that fact still surprises him.

"I can't believe it's been this long," he said.

It started in January of 1998. Sanders had just graduated from SIU Carbondale with a degree in math education — he'd originally pursued electrical engineering but discovered, through tutoring classmates who struggled with calculus, that explaining problems lit him up more than solving them alone. A midyear teaching opening appeared at Vandalia. The principal, Darrell Gummert, walked him through the building, introduced him to outgoing math teacher Helen Meske, and told him to call in a week if he wanted the job.

Sanders went home and called his dad. His father's response was immediate: "I would have just told him right there."

Sanders waited two days, called back, and said he'd be there Monday. Then he drove ninety miles each way from Carbondale for the rest of the semester because he didn't know a soul in Vandalia.

The accountability Sanders brings to his classroom didn't come from a teaching manual. It came from a coal miner's household in Marissa, Illinois, where his father worked for Peabody and later commuted weekly to a non-union mine in Petersburg, Indiana — Monday to Saturday, for ten years — because he believed in going where the work was. Three mining accidents. The last one put a ton of rock on his back and nearly paralyzed him. A surgeon in St. Louis pioneered a technique with titanium pins to save him. Before the operation, his father told the doctor: "Don't be out drinking tonight. I want you to have a steady hand."

That's the man who showed up at James's school the day he brought home a D+ in literature. Sat at the teacher's desk. Asked one question: "Can he do better?" The teacher said, "Oh, absolutely." His father didn't stay for another word — walked straight to the gym, broke the lock on the door, and pointed James home. The basketball coach called that night to see if James was still alive.

"Needless to say," Sanders said, "I never got a D plus again."

He doesn't apologize for expecting effort from his students. "We need more teachers like that," he said. "We need more parents like that."

That expectation was shaped further by his own teacher, Jim Derwort — an energetic, strict math teacher at Marissa who also coached eighth-grade and freshman basketball and ran marathons. "I wanted to be like my math teacher," Sanders said. The math gene people invoke as an excuse? He doesn't buy it.

"There's no math gene," he said. "It's a matter of what you set your mind to doing."

This year, Sanders introduced something new to Vandalia's curriculum: a statistics course, the first in the school's history. Four seniors will finish the inaugural class. Twenty are enrolled for next year. The format was a departure for him — no board lectures, just independent reading, note-taking, and real-world analysis covering everything from biology and medicine to wildlife populations and the Iditarod. It felt like college, which was the point.

Outside school, Sanders is a serious woodworker — a craft he traces to age eight or nine, when his mother wanted duck yard ornaments with umbrellas that nobody could find, and his father said, "Well, we can just make those." From there it grew. Today his shop holds walnut, red oak, cherry, cedar, and century-old lumber salvaged from a house in Taylorville — boards pried off walls with square nails, repurposed into live-edge tables, jewelry boxes, a book stand with sixty-degree angles and decorative tenon joinery.

"The only thing I didn't do was grow the tree," he said.

He's never charged anyone for his work. Once. His former brother-in-law commissioned a ten-foot bar made from corrugated rusted metal and "Million Mile Oak" from a semi-trailer bed. Sanders was going to give it to him — until the man said he could build it cheaper himself. "I said, it's 500 bucks then."

In twenty-eight years, Sanders has watched generations pass through his classroom. Some thanked him on the spot. Some thanked him later — at Walmart, years after graduation, approaching him to say the same thing: "I wish I just did what you told me to do."

On the wall of his workshop, mounted on Ohio River driftwood, hang his deer skull mounts. One was taken with his father's crossbow, from his father's favorite stand, after his father had passed.

"It was kind of a tribute to him," Sanders said.

Twenty-eight years of going where the work was. The son of a coal miner, building things that last.