Mary Sue, left, and Rachel Dalton stand in the Petrova Elementary classroom where Mary Sue taught before retiring in June, before handing the keys over to Rachel, her daughter, who will pick up the second-grade instruction from her mother when classes start on Sept. 6. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Cerbone)

SARANAC LAKE — Mary Sue Dalton retired from a 32-and-a-half year career as a second grade teacher in Saranac Lake in June, but when students run into her former classroom on Tuesday — #211 at Petrova Elementary — they’ll be greeted by another Ms. Dalton: her daughter Rachel.

Rachel won’t actually be Ms. Dalton for long — she’s getting married at end of September and will be changing her last name — but she’s excited to take the reins from her mother and teach local youngsters when classes start on Sept. 6.

“It makes retiring easier, because I know that I’m giving it to her,” Mary Sue said. “She’s a good teacher.”

Rachel is actually the third generation of Daltons to teach at Saranac Lake schools. Mary Sue’s father was a geometry teacher at the Saranac Lake High School for 30-plus years, and she was his student one year.

Fortunately, Mary Sue said, he was one of the popular teachers and a caring father, but she always cringed with embarrassment when he bought out his banjo to play for the class.

Rachel is no stranger to room #211. She grew up playing hide-and-seek with her sister in the hallway during the summers while her mom worked there. She said she learned the “scary teacher voice” from her mom.

Her mother will also be close by. She’ll be coming back on Sept. 6 to substitute teach math long-term.

“I was retired for like, a month,” Mary Sue said, laughing.

She can’t stay away. She loves teaching and it has become her identity.

“It’s what I am at this point,” Mary Sue said. I’m a teacher.”

For Rachel and Mary Sue, second-grade is the “perfect age” for then to teach. Mary Sue said they’re turning into their own little people, but Rachel said they’re still “little sponges.”

Rachel has taught fourth and fifth grade before, but she feels this will be her “first real year” of teaching. She started in 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic and remote learning, and things didn’t feel like real school, she said.

“I feel like I’ve gotten the hardest years out of the way. It can only go up,” Rachel said, with a nervous laugh.

“I told her after the first year, ‘This was just a weird year. It was the hardest. It will get better,'” Mary Sue said. “And then the next year, I said, ‘No, honestly. This is a weird year. It will get better.’ She was like, ‘Enough. I don’t want to hear it.'”

Rachel didn’t expect to follow so closely in her mother’s footsteps. She went to college for marketing and art.

“I could tell when she went to school for marketing and art that that was not going to be it,” Mary Sue said. “I tried to tell her.”

“I didn’t want to listen to you,” Rachel said.

When she took classes at North Country Community College, she started volunteering at Petrova between classes, including in her mother’s classroom. Watching Rachel sitting there at a table with her students, Mary Sue said she could tell that Rachel was realizing that’s what she wanted to do.

“I think I was meant to do this,” Rachel said.

She got a teaching degree from SUNY Potsdam and was hired at SLCSD right away.

“It was meant to be,” she said.

Over the summer, Mary Sue has been giving Rachel “little tips” on being a good second-grade teacher. Being an effective instructor means being numerous different contradictory things at once, she said — flexible but consistent, engaging but silly.

“They have to know that you care about them,” Mary Sue said. “If they know that you truly care about them, then they’re open for teaching.”

Rachel’s also heard the horror stories. Mary Sue said one year, on the first day of school, a kid barfed on her shoes.

“Expect the unexpected,” Rachel said her mother told her.

Mary Sue saw all sorts of things in her more than three decades of teaching, including, in her final year, teaching the children of students she had toward the beginning of her career.

The day of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City was the most difficult day for teaching, she said. There was confusion, fear and chaos as students and teachers alike worried about friends and family.

Her favorite experiences were working with the third-grade teacher for a two-year shared course. She got to spend a lot more time with those students and bonded with them more than ever. Mary Sue said she’s been invited to the some of these former students’ weddings.

Rachel said she loves Petrova. She has friends who work in other districts, and from what she hears, none are as supportive of teachers as hers.

There are some differences in how mother and daughter will teach the second-graders under their tutelage. For one, Rachel uses more technology. She was the one who helped her mom stay up to date on bringing tech into the classroom. Rachel is working on a Master’s degree in educational technology.

“I had more stuff,” Mary Sue said.

Rachel spent the summer hauling a lot of it away — books published in 1936, stamps glued into bricks by time and 500 copies of the same work book in four different locations.

Mary Sue said everyone mocks the mountain of stuff until they need something from it.

“I would say things are a lot more organized in here than they were,” Rachel said, eliciting a piercing glare from her mom, one fine-tuned over decades of teaching.

Mary Sue said Rachel made the classroom her own. She’s looking forward to staying connected to room #211 though her daughter.