BAY MINETTE, Ala. — Marcia Haase is quick to tell her students when she has made a mistake.

“I broke a handwriting rule,” she told her class at Pine Grove Elementary. “I brought my pen up before I was finished.”

This is the last year Haase, a Bay Minette resident, will be leading students at Pine Grove through their lessons. She is retiring at the end of the spring semester, ending a 17-year career at the school.

“It started in high school,” said Haase about her desire to teach. After graduating, she said she was giving advice to other teens in St. Louis, Mo., one day when she came to the realization that, “I was called to be a teacher. It just fell on me like a ton of bricks.”

However, marriage and four youngsters derailed that dream for a while. She and her husband, Jerry, then lived in Tuscumbia, Ala.

Haase was a stay-at-home mom but started a housekeeping business out of her home.

Then she fell into a career in radio.

“I went in to pick up a prize, and they thought I might be a radio announcer.”

She trained to run an announcer’s board and then went to work for the station. Haase said her Missouri accent sounded good to listeners. She also started writing a recipe column for local newspapers.

“I was cleaning a grocery store office, and I asked, ‘Who is in charge of merchandising or marketing?”‘

Her idea to start a regular recipe column was taken up. Life was busy and interesting, but Haase still wanted to be a teacher.

When a man who visited the radio station told her about Pell grants as a way to finance education, Haase leapt at the chance. She started school at what is now Northwest Shoals Community College. She later transferred to the University of Mobile and eventually earned a master’s degree in education at the University of Mobile.

“I was 44 when I started college,” she said. She admits it was “scary.”

“I was older than all my professors.”

After spending five years as a teacher’s assistant in a Head Start program, she was ready to take a classroom of her own.

Some of her cooking expertise helped during those early years as a teacher.

“For a while, we made apple butter (in class),” she said.

The cooking lesson incorporated a number of lessons for the children.

“There is science with cooking, math with the ingredients, history, social studies and a lot of vocabulary,” said Haase.

While lesson plans have changed over the years, one thing has not. The best part of her job can be summed up in two words.

“The kids,” she said. “Sometimes you just want to take them home.”

Teaching, Haase says “should be a calling.”

As much as she loves teaching, work as an aerobics instructor at the North Baldwin Wellness Center is an activity she wants to pursue among other things.

“I want to learn Spanish and more sign language,” Haase said. “We should be the signing capital of the world,” she added, reflecting on Helen Keller’s roots in Alabama.

Other educators retiring at the end of the current school year include Patricia Carlton, Ronald Criswell, Marie Still, Rebecca Clemmons, Frances Pierce, Elaine Prosser, Margaret Szedlmayer, Cassandra Jones, Rebecca Pierce, Lynn Rockwell, Martha Culleton and Gary Stoltz.