The end of this past school year also marked the end of a teaching career for a Waterloo history-lover who always brought a passionate performance to his lessons.

One of several educators who retired this spring is Mark Toennies, who most recently served the community as the seventh grade social studies teacher at Waterloo Junior High School.

Toennies has lived in Waterloo all his life, attending Ss. Peter & Paul Catholic School and Gibault Catholic High School and achieving his bachelor’s degree in social studies at Southwestern Illinois University Edwardsville.

As Toennies explained, it took him some time to decide he ultimately wanted to pursue a career as a teacher.

“When I got out of high school, I drifted for a long period of time,” Toennies said. “I had a couple jobs. I worked for a hardware store, and I never really had any direction. But I did get the chance, because I had the college credits, to substitute as a teacher’s aid in the Waterloo School District.”

It was at age 26-27 that he earned his master’s degree in elementary education at SIU-Carbondale, with his career really starting at the former St. Augustine of Canterbury school in Hecker.

From there, he served as a paraprofessional in the Waterloo School District for several years before he was brought on as a fourth grade teacher at Rogers Elementary, then known as Waterloo Middle School.

With four years there, his most recent teaching stint has been at WJHS, where Toennies has now wrapped up 30 years of teaching.

Though it took time to find his calling, Toennies pointed to several factors that drew him toward teaching social studies.

Above all was a tremendous passion for the subject – history was his favorite subject in school – but he also identified his interest in performance, each lesson serving as an opportunity to engross students in a new story.

“I’m a bit of, I think, an entertainer, storyteller,” Toennies said. “I often tell everybody that if I wouldn’t have been a teacher, I would have been a game show host. I like the combination of getting up and telling a story and trying to make it as interesting as possible. There’s a little bit of performance in it that I was drawn to.”

His drive to entertain seemingly served his educating very well as he, alongside his peers, have had to fight more and more to maintain students’ attention.

“Seventh graders are challenging, to say the least,” Toennies said. “There’s a lot going on in their heads, and attention spans are not like they used to be, so I tried to make it as interesting as I could.”

Looking back on his tenure, Toennies noted that, like any history teacher, he had a particular era of interest, his being the events leading up to the American Civil War.

It’s likely that interest rubbed off on a number of younger students thanks to an especially large lesson he put together during his time teaching fourth grade.

Toennies recalled the Civil War battle demonstrations he would put on in the gym, with students building forts and enjoying a game akin to capture the flag, battle music playing throughout.

While that lesson was a bit too cumbersome to bring with him as he moved to seventh grade, Toennies still tried to keep certain lessons plenty interesting, like with his Constitution cookie cake contest, with his classes competing in games during their unit on the U.S. Constitution in an effort to earn the sweet reward.

Toennies was overall quite positive about his time as a teacher, though he acknowledged there were some hiccups here and there – whether they were simply rough years or the constant challenge of keeping students engaged.

The energy demand, he said, was perhaps the biggest reason he decided to step away this year.

“Teaching is hard,” Toennies said. “It requires a certain amount of patience which, I’ll be honest with you, I never knew I really actually had… It takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of energy from you. And I think one of the reasons why I finally decided to step away is because I simply am tired all the time, and I just cannot bring the energy level I once did.”

Still, Toennies said he will look back on his education career fondly given how much he enjoyed the storytelling and jokes that were at the core of his lessons.

“Sincerely, deep down, I love kids and working with students,” Toennies said. “I enjoyed both grade levels, when I taught fourth grade and I enjoyed teaching junior high… I was fortunate enough that I was able to adapt to both.”

Even as entertainment and engagement were a major part of his classes, Toennies noted his primary hope with his retirement is that he instilled an interest in history in each student he worked with.

“I guess my biggest job that I wanted to do with junior high kids was get them interested in history,” Toennies said. “To me, it’s not really terribly important that they know the names and the dates, names of specific battles or particular documents. All of that is extremely important, but to me, especially at the junior high level and even at the elementary level, the biggest thing for me was to get them to have an interest in history so that they would go out and, on their own, look it up.”

Several of his colleagues certainly feel he accomplished just that.

WJHS eighth grade social studies teacher Sarah Phegley noted Toennies’ well-known fondness for Abraham Lincoln along with the rest of Civil War history.

She praised the energy he brought to his classroom, noting that students often discussed his classes with other teachers.

“He taught with a passion for history and made the kids have that same passion for history,” Phegley said. “He is a great colleague to work with. Probably his greatest attribute as a teacher is his storytelling ability. I had a student one time describe it as ‘being around a campfire,’ and I think that’s what made Mark so magical as a teacher.”

WJHS seventh grade science teacher Holly Garrett voiced a similar sentiment, commenting on how often students discussed his lessons in her class, or how she and her students often heard Toennies’ bombastic lessons even as they were a few classrooms away.

“Social studies kind of has a negative connotation with many students as being boring and dull, but with Mark’s teaching style, his passion for the subject was very evident, very obvious, and the kids were just drawn to his lectures,” Garrett said. “In this day and age, lecturing to them tends to not be super productive any more, but with the way that Mark was able to bring history to life and the passion behind his lectures, the kids were always in-tune.”

As he steps into his retirement, Toennies admitted he’s not sure what the future holds for him, though he’s eager to enjoy the summer – possibly with a trip up to New Hampshire.

From there, he expects he’ll have to find something to occupy his time come August, though he said he’ll always be a Bulldog at heart.