Math teacher retires after 37 years

Retiring Havre High School math teacher Mary Wagner doesn't like change.

If it were up to her, she said, she would bring back the chalkboards and throw out the cellphones.

Mary liked it when times were simpler.

"Changes are going to happen. I'm not a big change person. My living room still looks the same as it did in 1983. I tell the kids I'm an old-fashioned person with a few modern ideas," she said.

Mary speaks quickly but fluidly and clear. She rarely stops smiling when doing so. Mary smiles a lot.

Thirty-seven years ago, Mary made a big change and moved to Havre, but didn't plan on staying more than a year. A trip on her roller skates changed her outlook.

"When I came here, I didn't have a car and the only way I could get around was on my roller skates. The old Buttreys was in the Atrium and I would roller-skate to the grocery store and they would let me keep my roller skates while I was shopping," Mary said. "I remember coming home and calling my family back in Shelby and saying, 'I'm going to be here for a long time. They're letting me wear my roller skates while I grocery shop.'"

For Mary, the manager's concern about her having to take the skates off and putting them back on is a perfect reflection of what's great about Havre.

"It is the people in Havre that make you want to stay here for a long time. I never left. I came here, met my husband here, I have six children - I raised all my children here."

During the interview, Mary took a call from her daughter in Missoula, who is also a teacher. The Havre High School yearbook had just come out, and it's been dedicated to her. Her daughter wrote the dedication in it and Mary told her she summed up 37 years "perfectly beautiful."

Mary credits her passion for math and love of students for her successful teaching career.

"I tell the kids, 'When you come into my class, if you hate math, by the time I'm done with you, you'll like it. If you like math, by the time I'm done with you, you'll love it. If you already love math when you come into my class, how can it get any better than that?' I always tell the kids, 'It's going to be a good experience whether you love math or not,'" she said.

Mary's approach is to encourage students in the areas they are good at - "every student is good at something"- and to channel that confidence into the math classroom.

Mary said teaching goes beyond the classroom, adding it's also the reason teachers who don't like young people should not be teaching.

"You gotta teach because you care about the future of all these little, precious human beings sitting in front of you every day. And even the ones we may not think are going to go on and do big things,"- she paused before continuing in a softer tone - "they're going to surprise us," she said, her grin widening at the end.

She told a story about a student named Casey Donoven who lived up the Hi-Line and switched schools so he could go to Havre High. Casey entered the Who Wants to be a Mathematician competition in 2007. Students packed into the pep bus and left for Missoula at 4 a.m. to support him.

"There were tons of kids competing. All the other kids were there by themselves. Casey had an entire cheering section. And he won the competition," Mary said, pointing to a newspaper clip on her classroom wall of Casey, surrounded by students with signs and banners with his name.

Mary has stacks of anecdotes illustrating how things have changed since she began her career. Change, again, is the topic.

"We were trusted more as professionals to make professional decisions in our classroom - there wasn't so much governing from above," she said. "And that's nothing against our school district or anything. It's just all come down from Washington."

Mary discussed standardized tests.

"We were in the middle of the No Child Left Behind and having to do all the paperwork. As I'm in those meetings, I'm going, 'Oh, my God, in two years, it's going to be gone, and I'm wasting my time doing all this garbage.' Guess what?" she said, straightening her head forward. "And it was gone. And now we have a new standardized testing - and guess what? It's gone! Because the computers had glitches in them."

Adding to the already-present burden of teaching within the boundaries imposed by politicians, Mary touched on the always-evolving, paradoxical fact of life: technology.

"The cellphone has changed education. A lot of times you're teaching and kids are so busy trying to send that last text off, and they're down here doing this" - she mimed looking down at her lap - "they're missing it all."

There's another thing Mary said she misses as an educator.

"When I first came here ... we had an office downstairs, and I'm busy working in the corner of my office late in the day. The door to my office opens up and Bill Johnson, a man I taught with, walked in, and he had a gun in his hand. He said, 'Hasquet!' - 'cause that was my maiden name - 'I've had enough of your crap.' And he shot me," she said.

"It was a track meet starter gun. I honest to God thought that he shot me. I thought I was dead. And I kept waiting for the blood," she said, looking down at her midsection. "This was in the middle of a school day. Times have changed. Can you imagine now if you heard a shotgun go off what would happen in this school? But nobody missed a beat then. They just heard a shotgun," she said, before continuing. "Anyway, I remember standing up, going, 'Why haven't I hit the ground and where's the blood?' And he's over there dying laughing.

"We did pranks on each other all the time. I mean, we were still teaching, but we were having some fun," Mary said. "We don't have fun anymore."

Mary is looking forward to the next phase of her life - she welcomes this change.

She said she's tired; too much is being asked of her and she won't do it anymore. It's time to retire and spend time with her grandchildren, she added.

She said she's going to babysit her five grandchildren, take them to the park and swing a bat with them - go to Dairy Queen.

But Mary has no plans to quit doing math. She started a math hotline many years ago.

"I'm keeping the math line so I can keep the brain sharp," she said, tapping her head with her index finger. "I wanna still do math."

Sticking to her anti-change mantra, Mary said she would replay the entire thing again.

"Honestly, if I could do it all over again, I would do exactly what I've done," she said. "I would not change a thing. These have been the greatest 37 years of my life."