Mary Young’s professional career didn’t turn out like she had planned back in college.
Young attended Gustavus Adolphus University in Saint Paul, Minn., where she majored in pre-medicine. She was studying fields including chemistry and physics, and had goals to be a doctor.
After marrying her husband and the family relocating to Cedar Rapids for his job, Young was waiting to get her residency in state to begin attending the University of Iowa to continue her education in medicine.
“In that year, I had a change of heart,” she said. “I watched my husband putting in 80 hour work weeks, and knew we wanted to raise a family together. I opted to go back to school to get my teaching certificate instead.”
Young ended up completing her teaching credentials at Coe College, including a year of student teaching at Linn-Mar school district.
Following that, the couple’s first child had arrived, and there were a few in rapid succession.
“It got to a point where I’d be paying more in daycare than I could when I was working, so I maintained being a stay at home mom for the time being,” she said.
She was very active in her children’s classrooms, always volunteering and offering private tutoring for friends and neighbors that needed that. She also had some long term substitute teaching opportunities over the years.
Young was also on the Mount Vernon School Board, serving alongside members like Tom Wieseler and Dean Borg.
“Those two were especially gracious in educating a new member in how the board functioned and the collaborative effort we all had to make our area schools better,” she said.
In 2002, a position for a part-time math teacher opened up at Mount Vernon schools.
“My situation had changed,” she said. “Our oldest was just graduating high school and our youngest was just turning 3. We knew college tuition would be a potential cost we were facing, and this was a way to help pay for that.”
Young joined as a teacher in math part-time that school year, and has been teaching at the Mount Vernon district for the past 20 years.
In addition to teaching math, Young has had numerous opportunities to use her science knowledge in teaching opportunities as well, helping to teach additional sections of biology.
“One of the favorite classes I ever taught was a joint class between me and our art teacher where we taught the art and science of the human body,” she said. “I was responsible for teaching the science portions of the class.”
Her favorite part of teaching the past 19 years has been her students.
“They were the reason I enjoyed getting out of bed every morning,” Young said. “It wasn’t just what I taught them, it’s what my students taught me. They taught me how to be resilient and embrace joy.”
She also loved working with her colleagues.
One of the biggest challenges she faced was keeping her lesson plans creative.
“I focused to make lesson plans that were taught with excitement the same way I did my first year of teaching up through my 17th year of teaching,” Young said.
The other hard part of the job was seeing students suffering through challenging life situations on top of their education.
Young was an advisor for an electric vehicle club from 2006 to 2009.
“The students did most of the work, I was just the faculty figurehead helping them pursue their passion,” she said. “Their love of trying to get a vehicle to run on electric power was contagious, and most of those students have now moved on to be engineers working in alternative fuel industries years later.”
It was also a way to see students applying the mathematics they learned to real life situations.
One of the largest changes she has noticed in 19 years of teaching is the advent of technology.
“When I started in 2002, we would take attendance via computer, but that was pretty much all we utilized computers for,” Young said. “In the next 19 years, the amount of online grading, class presentations, social media and the likes have benefited teachers in communicating with students and parents.”
While applications have also helped her students be able to find the correct answer to a math problem, Young’s challenge is helping students understand the reasons of why or how they got to that answer, to reiterate what ways math will be used in their real life.
Young expects to spend more time with her seven grandchildren and children in her retirement. She wants to do more traveling as well, and look at increasing her volunteer work. She’s hoping to do some more substitute teaching to maintain some of those interactions with students as well.
During the past school year before retiring, Young had taken time away to spend more time taking care of her parents after a health scare.
“I’m very, very grateful to the district for allowing me to take that time and step away from the classroom,” Young said. “It’s what made me realize it was time to retire and spend more time caring for my parents.”
Young commended the district in helping her six children be prepared for college and graduate school education they participated in.
Every one of the children has gone on to be successful in college, Young said, with the youngest getting her undergraduate degree this past spring.
“She’s now looking to graduate school at Notre Dame,” Young said. Young also said she was grateful to work with colleagues at the school who pushed for being exceptional in all cases.
Young noted she and her husband had a discussion when he ended up in Cedar Rapids, that she was hoping this would only be a temporary stay before they moved back to larger cities. Young, who grew up in the Twin Cities metro, wanted to be in larger communities after a stint in Cedar Rapids.
“I can’t think of any other place than Mount Vernon that I would have wanted to live, invest my career and raise my children,” Young said. “I look at this is where we’re supposed to be.”