Teacher retires after 52 years of sharing her most important lesson

Mary Pickerrell’s smile captures the joy she has always found in being immersed in the lives of students at St. Anthony of Padua School in Clarksville. (Submitted photo)

By John Shaughnessy

The sign on her classroom door—“This is my happy place”—and the way she smiles at it reveal so much about Mary Pickerrell.

For 52 years, she has been teaching at St. Anthony of Padua School in Clarksville—the school where she spent the first eight years of her education as a child, the school where she views every child she has taught as a gift in her life.

“Every day has been a pleasure,” says Pickerrell, who has taught first grade for most of her career. “If you love your job as much as I do, you really don’t have a job to work at. It’s just a place to go to love kids. And I love these kids.”

What she loves most is sharing the main lesson that she hopes the children will carry with them for the rest of their life—because it’s the major blessing that has guided her 75 years of life.

“You can teach kids anything, but the thing I’m most proud of is that I taught them to pray,” she says. “And I taught them that God never fails. And I taught them to love Jesus as much as I love Jesus. And I tell them all the time that Jesus loves me. I tell them, ‘There’s no doubt that Jesus loves me, but you’re his favorite because he says, “Let the little children come to me” (Mt 19:14).

“We pray all the time in here. We pray for whatever they want to pray for. ‘My grandma’s sick.’ ‘My aunt had to have surgery.’ ‘I can’t find my lunchbox.’ I teach them to pray.”

Lately, Pickerrell has been praying to God to be with her as she prepares to retire from her happy place on May 23.

‘The coolest thing in the whole world’

“I’m ready to go mentally and physically, but my heart will always be here,” says Pickerrell, who graduated from the school in 1964. “Getting through this is going to be tough. But you have to go sometime. And I want to go while I’m healthy. I don’t want to wait too long and not be able to do the things that me and my husband have been waiting to do. He’s ready for me to retire.”

Her first-grade students aren’t.

“They don’t want me to leave. They beg me all the time. They say, ‘But this is your happy place. It just won’t be the same.’ I said to them, ‘Are you coming back to first grade next year?’ They say, ‘No, but can’t you just stay one more year?’ And they cry.”

As the principal of the school and a friend of Pickerrell, Stephany Tucker understands the children’s emotions. She feels them, too.

“Mary is the most loving, caring person that I know,” Tucker says. “She is strong and brave, but also gentle and patient.  Even after 52 years of teaching, her dedication to teaching and the love for her students are unwavering. She has always considered her classroom her happy place, and I know every student that was a part of the class knew it was her happy place. Generation after generation, people come back and share memories of Mary.

“The one connection that I see Mary makes with her students is sharing her love of Jesus with them. Of course, reading, writing and math were a top priority, but her goal in teaching students was to make sure they knew and loved Jesus.”

As the school year has neared its end, Pickerrell has been sorting through 52 years of memories—the physical ones that are in the boxes of materials she has kept, and the other ones that are stored in her mind.

She remembers that she has wanted to be a teacher since she was in the fourth grade and her teacher was Miss Rogie.

“She was young and fun, and I thought she was the coolest thing in the whole world. And I wanted to be just like her,” she recalls. “In those days, the teachers had to wear uniforms. They wore navy blue suits. I thought that was so cool. I was ready to go out and start looking for a suit.”

Getting ready to throw away a box of letters a month ago, Pickerrell was thrilled when she found an envelope filled with small black-and-white photos of the children in her first class during the 1972-73 school year.

“I had 31 kids. Believe it or not, I could name every one of those children except two,” says Pickerrell, a 1968 graduate of Our Lady of Providence High School in Clarksville. “I guess your first class, you just remember those little kids.”

“Those little kids” now have an average age of 58—one more example of all the changes that have come for her as a teacher.

“When I first started, we had those purple mimeograph things that you had to fire up the machine and put ink in it, and you had to be careful not to get it on your clothes. Now you just push a button for everything,” she says. “There’s boxes and boxes of chalk I’ve found because there was always a blackboard. Now we have a whiteboard. But I’ve been able to roll with the changes pretty good.”

Perhaps the most challenging changes came during the last week of her 52 years of teaching.

The three greatest loves of her life

The schedule included an all-school Mass during which she was being honored, with all her family proudly supporting her: her husband of 45 years, Greg, her six children, her 10 grandchildren and other relatives.

Before the Mass, Pickerrell had no doubt that she would cry on a day that featured the three greatest loves of her life: her faith, her family, and the teachers and students she has always embraced as family. Just imagine the love that poured out for her that day.

“She’s an incredible lady who has always had a passion for teaching,” says Lori Miller, one of her children. “We are all so proud of her accomplishments and her dedication to the Catholic school and to the Catholic Church. We are all looking forward to seeing her relax and take it easy now.”

Pickerrell’s future plans include spending more time with her children and grandchildren and getting to travel with her husband. A lengthy, relaxing trip to New England and Nova Scotia in the fall is already planned. Still, there’s one more road she has to travel before she turns in the direction of her retirement.

That happens on May 23, her last day in the place that has long been at the heart of her life.

It’s the place where she has always been among the first teachers to arrive and the last to leave, the place where she often came on weekends to make her lesson plans for the week, the place where she taught generations of students the power and the gift of prayer.

As she leaves the school that day, she will carry with her the memories of 52 years of teaching. She will also carry with her the sign that has succinctly captured all those years, “This is my happy place.”

“I told my class, ‘I’m going to take the sign with me. I’m going to take my happy place with me. But you’re in my memory, and you always will be.’ ”

She thought of all the children she has taught through the years and added this thought:

“They’ll always be in my heart.” †