Joanna Rotberg, at 73; fought ALS while focusing on teaching

JOANNA ROTBERG

Joanna (Henshaw) Rotberg had bested the odds by surviving amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, for 16 years when the life expectancy after diagnosis is typically three to five years. Then, in 2006, she received the even-rarer diagnosis of mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer.

Rather than lose her will, her friends and colleagues said, the retired special-education teacher approached the seemingly overwhelming dual challenges by adopting the approach she had used with her students: Focus on what you can do.

"This is an extremely athletic, fit woman who went from that to stumbling over blades of grass," said her close friend and former co-worker, Barbara Lockwood of Arlington. "When she could, she coped intellectually."

Mrs. Rotberg, who taught in Lexington public schools for 21 years, died Saturday at her summer home in Madison, N.H. She was 73 and had lived in Cambridge and Lexington for 48 years.

Mrs. Rotberg, who retained the use of her fingers during her illness, focused much of her energy on typing her memoirs. First, she detailed her childhood in London and the complex life of her mother, child psychiatrist Edna Oakeshott, in "Intrepid Woman: My Mother," a book published in 2004. In the last two years of her life, despite increased pain and frailty, she worked feverishly to complete the story of her own adult experiences for her grandchildren.

"She wanted to give the grandchildren an acquaintance with moral, as well as practical choices," said her husband, Robert, who will print copies of the 100-page work for each grandchild.

Joanna Hermione Henshaw was born in Manchester, England, and raised in the Hampstead section of London. After high school, she tended the queen's rose gardens in London for a time, according to her husband. On a ski trip in Austria with 60 or so members of Oxford-Cambridge's ski group, she met Robert Rotberg at the top of one of the mountains.

In 1960, she joined Rotberg in Cambridge, Mass., where he was a professor at Harvard University, and in the spring of 1961 they were married in England.

When she first arrived in Cambridge, the experienced horticulturalist worked in the botanical labs at Harvard. But after the couple started a family, she decided she would rather work with troubled children.

Mrs. Rotberg earned master's of education degrees from both Tufts University and Lesley University. In 1976, she began teaching at the Gifford School in Weston, which specializes in learning, behavioral, and emotional issues. Two years later, she joined the Lexington system, first working with troubled 6- to 8-year-olds at Bridge Elementary and later Hastings Elementary.

"She was always attracted to the toughest jobs," her husband said. "She loved working with the most difficult children because she could provide the most value added. They were the ones that, without her or someone else, would have sunk to the bottom of the pool and vanished."

When Mrs. Rotberg started in Lexington, her students were isolated from the general student population, but before long she was advocating for integration. Together with a kindergarten teacher and her longtime friend Lockwood, a first- and second-grade teacher, Mrs. Rotberg developed a system for easing her students into the mainstream, Lockwood said.

"She tried to make the expectations for the children she was working with realistic," Lockwood said.

Part of doing so was not overwhelming a special-needs student into a mainstream classroom, but "structuring it so that some of the children from my classroom would go work in Joanna's, in small groups with her children," she said.

Mrs. Rotberg got a thrill out of the times when she would run into a former student or hear that one had successfully adjusted to young adulthood, her husband said.

She was forced into retirement in 1999, when she began to lose her speaking ability to ALS. It was then that she began her career as a memoirist.

During her ALS treatment, she befriended Dr. Robert Brown, a specialist on the disease at Massachusetts General Hospital. Early in her final year, Mrs. Rotberg decided she would donate her body to Brown to help further ALS research, her husband said.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Rotberg leaves three daughters, Rebecca Gattey and Nicola, both of Portland, Ore., and Fiona of Vallentuna, Sweden; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for the fall.