“I loved what I did, so did you and so did you,” Susan Bahr said to her fellow retirees.

It was Monday, the second to last day of the school year, and Bahr, a third-grade teacher, was sitting with Jo Walters, a music teacher and Marcia MacCash, a kindergarten teacher, in the Wyman Elementary library.

It was a good time to reminisce about the teachers careers. Another school day had just ended and students were quickly filing out of the school, heading for their buses to make it home.

Each teacher, has spent over 20 years in the Rolla school system and are retiring this year.

So it goes without saying, the women have a wealth of experiences.

Yet, all of them profess to having absolute passion for the job.

“I think if people don’t have passion they don’t stay with it,” Walter said.

All three swear a teacher needs that passion, because the job requires that, because a teachers day is not confined to the time they are in the class.

It is an all-day, all-year round position.

“Either you are teaching or you are thinking about what you are going to teach, or you are recuperating from it,” Bahr said.

Unlike other jobs, teachers can not pick up and leave for a few hours in the middle of the day to take care of other things.

Even in the summers, the three, like many other teachers were spent training, on new technologies, techniques, or anything else they felt would improve their work in the classroom.

“When you are learning in the summer you are thinking what to do next year,” Walters said.

The changes were both positive and negative for the teachers. Technology allowed them to teach in new ways that reached the students, but they had to give up more of their time to utilize the technology.

It was done to keep up with changing standards.

“People think kindergarten is where you go and play, it is so much more academic now,” MacCash said.

The teachers also had to keep up with the kids, who have grown up with technological knowledge as a given.

They did all this because of their passion for the job.

Sure there are regrets or things the teachers can’t change now but those don’t outweigh what they gained from teaching.

“I will take all the gifts from what I did and know there will be regrets,” Walters said.

Those gifts include the family situation the teachers found themselves in.

“By the end of kindergarten you feel like a family,” MacCash said.

Walter as a music teacher didn’t have the same situation as the other two.

She did not teach a single class for the entire year but taught every student, not really allowing her to connect in the same way as MacCash and Bahr.

“My hurt doesn’t hurt so much at the end of the year,” Walters said.

Now, teaching is over for the three and they are moving on, into another large group.

“We have a whole group of retired teachers to show us how to have fun,” MacCash said.

All three teachers have signed up to do substitute teaching.