After dedicating over 30 years to teaching, Mary Ann Eiserman, English teacher, has decided to retire after the end of the school year.
At the end of a dedicated career, Eiserman remembers teaching was not in her original plan.
“I actually thought I would go into journalism or law, but my mother was the secretary for the superintendant of schools and she thought that teachers had summers and vacations with their children, so she said that I could major in anything I wanted to as long as I also got my teaching certificate,” Eiserman said.
With Eiserman’s mother pushing her to become a teacher, she graduated from Monmouth College and has worked at a school in Southern Illinois, Wauconda High School, and is finishing her 29th year at LZHS.
During her time at LZHS, Eiserman has been the newspaper adviser, cheerleading sponsor, student council advisor, and the sponsor of Students Against Driving Drunk. She is still currently the head of the Environmental Club and the Law Club.
While Eiserman admits the decision to retire was a very difficult one for her since teaching has become a major part of her life, she plans to keep busy during retirement.
“I have written four childrens’ books and I have one that has been illustrated— my sister is a very talented art teacher, so she illustrated that book for me—and it’s about my granddaughter, Anna, so I would like to try and find a publisher for these books,” Eiserman said. “And they’re all about the girls in our family.”
Eiserman said the idea to write these books came to her about six years ago.
“I was sitting at the kitchen table with Anna and we were having breakfast, and all of a sudden there were just these words in front of me,” Eiserman said. “My grandfather had been a composer, of mostly religious music, and some nights there would be notes in front of him and he would have to get out of bed and write them down, and other times there would be words in front of him and he would have to write them down; and then sometimes they wouldn’t go with anything, so he would keep books with words and books with notes and then sometimes they really did go together. So I just knew that morning that I had to write them down.”
Eiserman says there are four more girls in her family she wished to write books about, as well as about her grandnephew.
“I also have this grandnephew who is severely disabled and I would like to write a book entitled ‘Jackson is Special,’ and I think that’s going to be quite difficult to do,” Eiserman said. “I think it would help other families, too, but it’s going to be challenging.”
Along with family being important to Eiserman, she hopes to work with other matters that are important to her in retirement.
“I have a slight opportunity to do volunteer work for a non-profit corporation and they are trying to bring jobs back to America and that’s very important to me,” Eiserman said. “I don’t actually have a firm offer yet. I’m hoping that it would be short term and we would get a lot of jobs back.”
Although she looks forward to future plans, Eiserman says she will miss the students and faculty at LZHS. She said she has made close connections with several teachers and enjoys interacting with her students daily.
“What I realized is that many, many years ago, 15 or more, my really good group of friends left, so they’ve been retired for a really long time so then what I did was I made friends with a lot of the younger faculty members, so I don’t really have a lot of friends around my own age,” Eiserman said. “I will miss them because they have taken me in and have also treated me as if I’ve had some wisdom to teach them. And that’s been very nice, that they’ve wanted to seek my advice. And I have loved being friends with them.”
As far as teaching goes, Eiserman believes she will miss her students most of all.
“Where else do you get daily adulation—except maybe from a puppy—and I’ve had that almost every day of my career. Kids who have really responded, kids who remember me,” Eiserman said. “That’s the hardest part.”