• Student hopes to return favor and become teacher

Maria Carlson ticks every box of success in academic and social success in her Marion High School career. Her perfect grades earned her the Governor’s Scholar award and the role of class valedictorian, and she was elected homecoming queen.

Homecoming queen may “seem like a popularity contest,” she said, but what it symbolized for Maria was recognition that “I’ve gone out of my way to treat others kindly.” And she’s as proud of that as her grades.

In some ways her secondary school teaching major at Franciscan University in Ohio is an extension of the kindness she aspires to. She wants to make history come alive for high school students so they understand the world better.

“I really like explaining history. Sometimes I feel like kids don’t like it because classes aren’t very engaging, but I want to try and make it an engaging topic,” she said.

Marion High School didn’t turn her off the subject; it actually helped point her there.   

“My sophomore year, we had a really good history teacher,” Maria said. “She kind of brought up the idea of maybe I would want to go into history.”   

History study is a useful tool in contemplation of headlines today, she noted. It teaches you to think about “the factors at play that you can’t see in the moment [but] that you can clearly see” in retrospect, she said.

Her high school schedule was peppered with diverse activities: She took a sign language class online and was in several musical programs, playing flute, piccolo, and guitar and singing. And she describes a kind of thirst to get as much of this as she could in Marion because “my opportunities to participate in music are going to diminish greatly after high school.”

While she doesn’t know if she’ll return to teach in Marion, she did note that her father’s family has been farming the same land here for seven generations, and the emotional pull to return is serious.