After receiving a strong educational foundation from the University of Iowa, College of Education alumna Barbara Booth discovered a love for teaching that led to a 33-year career as a high school math teacher in Illinois.
Booth, who earned her Bachelor of Arts in Mathematical Education (Secondary Education) in 1967, is creating a scholarship to help future educators and was recently featured in an article published by UI’s Center for Advancement.
The following excerpt is from the article:
“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.”