A Teacher’s Greatest Lesson: Giving Back to Future Educators

Submitted Photo During her time at Iowa, Barbara Booth found a love for teaching. Now, she's paying it forward through her giving.

Sitting in a classroom with just a handful of other students, Barbara Booth (67BA) remembers studying some of the most well-known paintings of our time. Her high school art teacher had just come back from a European vacation and was showing the small group some slides of these timeless masterpieces.

“I felt lucky because a lot of my classes had five to seven students in them, so I had access and could ask a lot of questions of my high school teachers,” says Booth. “The small classes truly changed my life.”

The experiences at Pleasant Valley High School—then a rural district on the outskirts of the Quad Cities—instilled in Booth the idea of wanting to become an educator herself.

After spending her first two years at Bard College in New York, Booth transferred to the University of Iowa. Her classes at Iowa and learning from educators like Henry Kepner (62BA, 64MS, 70PhD) compelled Booth to pursue a career as a high school math teacher.

Submitted Photo Barbara Booth spent her entire professional career teaching high school math in Sterling, Illinois.

“I learned to focus on the students,” says Booth. “As a student, I might have been quite difficult to get along with. As a teacher, I strived to be accepting of students from all different backgrounds. Even when a kid was acting out or was difficult, it didn’t mean that they weren’t bright or ambitious. I focused on encouraging all my students.”

Booth taught high school math in Sterling, Illinois, for 33 years. It’s where she also met her spouse, Lani, who taught English and ran the school’s computer lab. They’ve now been married for 57 years.

“I feel fortunate that I got to do something that I really cared about, interacted with people that I could care about, and to have found a partner that I have loved all of this time,” says Booth. “I feel so fortunate.”

That’s why Booth—who now calls Henderson, Nevada, home—has a bequest in her estate plans that will create a scholarship at Iowa to support future math educators.

“For me, what really mattered in life was teaching,” says Booth. “It’s hard to recruit people to teach—especially math—in small schools and small towns. If they’re going to the University of Iowa, they have a chance to become a good teacher. I hope I can encourage others to learn and teach math.”