Jessie Thatcher's passion for education and love for OSU lives on through her great-granddaughter

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Teaching Gene
By Melissa Oxford

Bonnie Bost Laster didn’t choose to attend Oklahoma State University.  She basically inherited it.

The graduate student comes from a long line of OSU alumni that started with OSU’s first female graduate, Jessie Thatcher, in the spring of 1897. Jessie went on to teach in Oklahoma’s public schools for many years.

“I never even looked at other colleges when I was in high school,” Laster says.  “I knew I wanted to follow in Jessie Thatcher’s footsteps.”

As an undergraduate, Laster spent her freshman and sophomore years at OSU before she transferred to the University of Kansas during her junior year and received her bachelor’s in community health education.  She says she liked the health education program there and thought it was a good fit. When it came to pursuing her master’s, however, she knew exactly where she wanted to be.

“I can’t really describe the feeling I get when I’m walking on the OSU campus,” Laster says. “It really does feel like home. I guess I can just imagine Jessie walking there, too.”

As Laster graduates from OSU this month with her doctorate in educational psychology, she gives Jessie credit for her decision to pursue her degree and to do so at OSU.

Laster says she’s fortunate for her OSU roots and an inherited passion for education as well as having so many strong women in her family.

“Jessie was a feminist but in a very gentle, subtle way,” she says. “She didn’t march in picket lines or distribute feminist brochures. She simply pursued her bachelor’s degree.”

Laster says her great-grandmother was probably modest yet strong in her convictions.

“I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for her,” she says.  “Women didn’t get degrees back then.”

They couldn’t even vote.

“I am sure she was an incredible inspiration to others,” Laster says. “I know she is to me. And I am also sure she was completely unassuming about it.”

Like Jessie, Laster wants to teach, and she wants to teach research methodology and statistics specifically.

At the moment, Laster lives in Charlotte, N.C., and teaches as an adjunct professor at Winthrop University in South Carolina. She plans to teach advanced education psychology in the spring and research methods in the summer. She also hopes to become a full-time professor someday.

Her other teaching job involves bending into sometimes seemingly unnatural poses. Laster is a certified vinyasa power yoga teacher, and she’ll begin teaching classes after the first of the year.

She also works for The Evaluation Group, a private evaluation firm based in Columbia, S.C., and, together with her husband, Clint, remains a business partner with The Lolly Garden, a children’s clothing store in Tulsa.

When she isn’t working, Laster spends time with her family, which includes her two children, Hannah, 6, and Kaden, 4.

She says Hannah already shows signs of wanting to carry the family teaching legacy into the next generation. Hannah wants to be a dentist and teach at a dentistry school.

“We play school pretty much every day,” Laster says.