Mantle ends 36-year career at Colton High

Colton English teacher Jan Mantle is retiring after 23 years with the school.

After watching the train conductor kick a dead sheep off the tracks as they coursed through the bush, Jan Mantle began having second thoughts about her move to teach in Australia.

“All I could do was think I’d ruined my life,” she said

It was 1972. Colton’s retiring English teacher Mantle was coursing through the outback of Australia on a train.

Then she arrived in Bombala, the town where she had agreed to teach. She fell in love with it. For the next 11 years, Mantle would live and teach there.

This was one stop in the span of a 36-year career in teaching, the last 23 of which were spent in a corner classroom in Colton.

“I believe God called me to be a teacher. I never wanted to be anything else,” she said, sitting in the sunshine streaming through the windows of the room she has taught in for the past 23 years.

Mantle steps off into retirement today, June 10. She is excited.

“I think our future is in good hands with these people,” she said of her students. She has impacted her corner of the world, she hopes, by giving students the desire to read and write.

“I hope I’ve instilled a love for reading and learning. You’re learning your whole life. That will be my legacy,” she said.

Colton Superintendent Nate Smith said Mantle will be missed.

“She’s a very challenging teacher,” he said. “She’s a popular teacher in our school and good at what she does.”

The 64-year-old English teacher leaned back at her desk and ran through the biography of her life in an interview with the Gazette Monday.

Originally from Illinois, she graduated from Western Illinois University with a teaching degree in English in 1968. She taught for four years in Illinois and at the age of 26, attended a job convention for teaching in Australia.

After three days of indecision, Mantle decided to sign on.

Several months later, she found herself receiving an orientation on how to teach in New South Wales, Australia.

In this country she would meet her Canadian husband, Brian, raise their four children with him and set down roots for more than a decade.

“It was great. I met people from all over the world,” she said.

She met Brian when he published a personal ad in the local newspaper. On the phone before their first date, she told him she would be waiting “with bells on.”

“That hooked him,” she said with a smile. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls. Thirty-two years later, they are still together.

In the early 1980s, she and Brian felt called by God to set their sights back on North America. In 1983, they moved back to Washington state to be closer to Brian’s parents, who lived in British Columbia.

The transition was difficult. Mantle had been out of the states for more than 11 years at that point.

“I was sick for months from that,” she said. Leaving behind her best friends and church made her heartsick. For almost four years, she struggled with depression and missing Australia.

“We had a good life there,” she said.

During that time, the family moved around Washington, finally settling in Clarkston. She went to work on a masters degree at EWU, a shift which finally brought her out of the doldrums.

“I loved going up there to Eastern,” she said. She earned her Masters in the summer of 1988.

She started work at Colton schools in 1987.

By the time of her interview with the Gazette, most of the walls of her classroom were bare. Still in the cupboards were years of high school classics; 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Her all-time favorite book to teach is The Crucible. Plumbing the depths and corners of this classic American drama has been a delight year after year.

“To me, the integrity in it and the injustice- it’s just a moving piece of literature,” she said.

Mantle said she is happy with her career as a teacher and ready for retirement.