Interview with George E. Hohl

Karen Blair: Dr. Hohl, thank you very much for joining us, and sharing with us your preparation to become a teacher at Towson University and your subsequent career in education. I guess the best place to start is to begin in the beginning, and the first thing we would like you to do is share with us your early social context. Where you grew up, what you were thinking when you went through school as you got to high school, what did you think you would want to do once you graduated? Was college something that you expected to participate in, or were there other options that you were thinking about? George Hohl: I grew up, born in Pennsylvania, but came in to the area toward the end of World War II with my parents and my sister. My parents were both college graduates even though one was born in 1898, and one born in 1900. In college my mother majored in secondary education, and my dad in mathematics. Dad came south to work for the old Glenn L. Martin company, and because there's a little Pennsylvania Dutch in our background, he was actually doing interpretations of German rocket reports when they came back more toward the end of the war. Then he got into statistical work and so forth, so I had a good base of education that was guiding me. I ended up getting into so-called academic subjects in high school. I never came from a moneyed family, and few of us did at Kenwood, so we never thought of going to the Harvard’s and the Stanford’s and the MITs where a lot of money was involved. It was important for us to stay locally, and most of us did. Those who did not go to a state college often went to University of Maryland or Loyola, or some school nearby. I got into education because my mother was teaching, and I always seemed to enjoy working with kids, so it was very appropriate when a large group decided we were going to go to Towson. We all applied, and most made it. So I got into elementary education by choice, rather than secondary. Even though I had a pretty good math science background, I still chose to go into elementary. Starting at Towson, I was with a big group, a built in support system. We ended up living on campus, because at that time, back in the ‘50s, transportation to and from Towson was very limited. K.B.: Interesting. G.H.: You went into the city by bus--we were living in the eastern part of Baltimore County--you had to go into the city, and then back out to Towson on the old #8 streetcar line. So that's how I got to school. A lot of us may have had limited options in comparison to today's kids. I don't think any of us regretted what we did. I enjoyed Towson, at that time it was of course the State Teacher's College at Towson, and that's how we got started. K.B.: Do you remember anything about those education courses? You're chuckling. No. G.H.: Yes. K.B.: Oh, yes, okay. Were they theoretical, were they practical? G.H.: If they were theoretical, I never heard the theory. The courses were more practical; the people who led them were past teachers, often public school teachers, or long time folks who taught at Towson. We did not get a lot of theory that I can recall, but certainly got a lot of practical experience. Going to different schools observing, and then the follow-up discussions, class discussions regardless of what the subject was, all went back to working with kids. Many included some of the types of content you would teach. K.B.: And what was your student teaching experience like? What school or schools did you do then, and what grade levels? G.H.: I student taught at the old Towson Elementary School my first eight weeks. I think that was in a fourth grade class, led by a woman by the name of May Robinson who went on to become a principal, in fact the principal of what's now Hampton Elementary School. After that eight weeks, I went to Loch Raven Elementary School and taught a fifth grade led by Terry Bosco. Terry went on and became a principal later on in her own work. We taught all subjects in both the fourth or fifth grade classes. K.B.: Right. And so you were dealing with those intermediate level students, is that where you felt that you wanted to be, that was a comfortable fit for you? G.H.: We sort of had to agree to either do the intermediate or the primary. My lot fell into the middle school, or into the intermediate grade group. K.B.: Now I understand that you took a brief hiatus from being at Towson and tried another institution of higher education. Do you want to include a word or two about that? G.H.: Sure, a word or two. I ended up going to Drexel Institute starting my second year. I had done fine at Towson, like everybody else, but I had an inkling that I may want to be an engineer. My dad, with a math background, it was kind of a natural for me. So at that time, going to Drexel in Philadelphia, felt natural. But at that time, Drexel, had only two buildings, two academic halls. There was no place for students; you had to live literally out in the community, on the street. As I say, 21 meals on the street for a person 18, 19 years of age is just a little too much. So I chose, not because of the curriculum, just the conditions of living, to return to Towson. Now if you go back today, they have a much nicer campus, student housing and a place for a student center. It's very nice. But back in my day, conditions were not conducive to staying. So I came back and rejoined my class and graduated with my class. K.B.: Very nice. Which doesn't always happen when you . . . G.H.: No, I know. K.B.: Did you know when you were finishing your program, did you have a job? Was this pretty much a given, that you knew what school you were going to be, where you were going to be teaching when you graduated? G.H.: In 1955 when I graduated, I had some experiences that reinforced my desire to teach in Baltimore County. Believe it or not, at that time, I started at $3,200 a year, and Baltimore City was offering $3,400. But no, I wanted to stay in the county, and actually got associated with Villa Cresta Elementary School. I had been dating a girl who was a year ahead of me and had started teaching there. I was fortunate in that the principal, Gene Rush, had a job for me, and I knew where I was starting. It was a very great experience for me. I not only started there and taught a year, but then I was drafted in the United States Army for two years. Two years later I ended up going right back there. Interesting experience, it was a great school. As I say, maybe not proper politically to say, but I probably learned more from the assistant principal, at that time called the vice principal, a woman named Elizabeth Yoder, and she was a graduate of Towson. I learned more from her in a practical way about teaching than I did in all my years of undergraduate work. She was wonderful, and we all learned so very much there. It was a great school to start in, and that's why I was glad to be able to go back, after being away for two years. But they did one trick for me that I'll never forget, and we laughed about it for many years afterwards. At that time, the form of grouping for five classes in intermediate grades was homogeneous, so there was going to be a bottom class. So I . . . my destiny when I left was that I had the bottom fifth grade. We talk about that quite a bit, it was the bottom fifth grade. But doggone if they didn't keep the same type of class for me three years later; I had the slowest moving fifth grade! K.B.: They held that for you. G.H.: They said, welcome aboard. K.B.: Well, they might have also felt that you could, you were a good fit for that group. Maybe you had the talent and the skill to work with them. G.H.: Twenty boys too, there you go. K.B.: There you go, yeah. G.H.: There was nothing . . . there's nothing new today about single sex classes that we didn't have then. K.B.: Well, don't you think that we sort of recycle things in education? G.H.: Oh, we do an awful lot of that. K.B.: It's interesting, though, that you felt that that preparation that you got from your vice principal was so valuable. I think there's a recognition now that we need to continue to support teachers when they get into their first teaching position certainly, and beyond that as well. And maybe that's something that you demonstrated. G.H.: I think there's a practical thing that happens, too, when you're going through undergraduate training, it doesn't mean as much to you until you're teaching, and you have the need. Why do you do this, and why do you do that. So, in fairness to Towson and Elementary Education at the time, it may have been I was just not ready to receive all those things. K.B.: Well, you didn't know you needed to know. G.H.: I didn't know it. K.B.: I mean that's part of it as well. So how long did you stay with your bottom group of students? G.H.: I think a year, and then we kind of recycled around. It was not like a looping experience of following up on the next year. It was really, that was a class, and the next year's reorganization. After I came back, I taught at Villa Cresta four more years, and I had a variety of experiences. One year, I recall, we took different subjects, four different ones among us. Again interesting, all four of us later became principals. So I taught mathematics, somebody else had English/language arts, someone had social studies, someone had science. It was an interesting experience to work that way. Even though it fell out of favor afterwards in Baltimore County. We didn't do a lot, now we're back to it. K.B.: Of course. G.H.: Part of that cycle. K.B.: Exactly. What did you do, you said you were there for a total of four years, five years? G.H.: A year before I went in the service, and then four years after I came out. K.B.: And then what happens next? G.H.: Then I became, as they called it at the time, vice principal at Battle Grove Elementary in the Dundalk area. K.B.: Now did you have to go through any training to go into an administrative position, do you remember? G.H.: What had helped me, I'm sure I had visions of hoping to be an administrator. I started to work on my master’s degree at University of Maryland and was able to finish just a year and a half after I came back from the service. So I started preparing the very first year I was teaching. K.B.: And what was that a master’s degree in? G.H.: It was in Educational Administration and Supervision. K.B.: So you were getting some administrative kinds of training. G.H.: The principal I had, Gene D. Rush, also got me involved in things that he knew I would need, if I became an administrator. For example, I helped do scheduling right away. I learned some of the nuances of scheduling. I got involved with him and an assistant principal in some of the ordering we did, to meet needs. Those experiences proved to be very rich, and I probably never realized what was happening at the time. K.B.: That you were in training and preparation. G.H.: I had training and preparation. K.B.: Do it for you. So you go to Battle Creek, did you say? G.H.: Battle Grove. At that time, Baltimore County had a pre-service selection type group. You had to be selected to get into it; I've probably forgotten all the details. But there may be 20- 25 of us around the county, men and women. We met on Saturdays at Dumbarton House area. The leaders literally put us through a training, a skeletal training type thing, for people to become school administrators in elementary and secondary schools. K.B.: And was that also sort of a screening process? G.H.: Yes, absolutely! One of the most interesting participants was a very close friend of mine, Dean Pickens. In the middle of one Saturday session, I'll never forget that, the phone rang. He was directed to go out and pick it up. Well, it was on a loudspeaker, so when he went out to answer the phone, we were listening to his whole conversation. It was a training design. Dean was selected only because he was very mature and could react positively. The ‘other’ was a parent from his school who was complaining. Then the instructor, when we came back together, discussed what had transpired and went back and looked at nice things that Dean had done to diffuse an issue. K.B.: So it became one of those teachable moments. G.H.: Oh yes, it was very nicely done. K.B.: That's what good teachers do. G.H.: All the time. K.B.: So how long were you a vice principal? G.H.: The system had changed the title to assistant principal. I was an assistant principal for three years, and then became a principal in 1965. I was an assistant principal ’62 to '65; in '65 I was named principal of Chapel Hill Elementary School, on Joppa Road in Perry Hall. It was an interesting experience. It was at that time a 12-room school, but they were building an addition onto it. And the addition was supposed to be done by September first. K.B.: Uh-oh. G.H.: Yes, and you know what's coming. On the 15th of August, Josh Wheeler, who was a great superintendent appeared. I saw him coming through the door about three o'clock in the afternoon. Wires were everywhere, they hadn't finished the project. He said, “Can I walk around with you?” As we stepped over buckets and mops and pieces of equipment that hadn't been put in, you never saw anything like it in your life, and he said, “What are you going to do if they don't finish?” I said, “Well, we'll have six more classes that won't be housed in the new addition. What are you going to do with them?” So we ended up . . . and I had thought this through, three classes were in the multipurpose room at that time, the auditorium was a multipurpose room. One class was in the health suite, one was in a half-sized room previously used for special area teachers. And the sixth class was in the library. So I tried to rotate, as soon as the class was ready to go out of the library, one of the regular classes came in for their library experience. K.B.: Oh my goodness. G.H.: It was actually a very interesting thing, and I learned a couple things. If you're open and honest with people, you get tremendous support. I did not get one complaint from a parent. Really, only one came from a teacher who just didn't understand that her room wasn't ready and we couldn't just move into the new addition unless the space was released. But can you think of that whole experience, it lasted until about the 15th of November. So for September, October and a half of November, we had kids and all that, what you'd say is far less than an optimal setting. K.B.: But that takes a lot of orchestration and thought on the part of the principal, to kind of make that work out. G.H.: Yes it does, but I had the benefit of working with many good people. The total staff really helped pull this thing off, and it went very nicely. K.B.: One of the things that I think a principal is involved in is selecting staff for his school. And one of the things that I would love for you to talk a little bit about is, what were you looking for in terms of faculty, teachers for your schools? What kinds of characteristics did you think suggested that somebody either was or had the potential to be a good teacher? G.H.: I was always looking for a person who liked kids, first! That went right along with somebody who wanted to teach. Back in those early days some people had other options, a lot of other options, unlike today when jobs are tight. There were many options, but you need to make sure that candidates really wanted to teach. And I used to try to use what we call power question today in my approach. I used to have about five questions, and do much of what you're doing right now, ask the question and listen to the answer. Often the parameters of the person's experience and their outlook would come out right within the questions, and then their response to it. Yes, experience was important, and if I could get a good, experienced teacher with a good attitude, I’d recommend that individual. I would always look for a range of skills in people. I did not want to make it exclusive of any one. But I definitely wanted somebody who was a strong teacher. K.B.: Now at one point in your career, you had the opportunity to staff a new school. And I understand you also had some input into planning the physical plant, I mean the physical school itself. Talk to us a little about both of those, selecting your staff and creating the school environment. G.H.: I had been probably a principal there at Chapel Hill for six, seven, eight years, and I made a comment to my boss, Phil Rhoads. I said to Phil, “Why don't we include experienced teachers in the planning process? We have schools created, and then suddenly we need a principal. Have we ever thought of getting a principal or some experienced people involved with the architect in the school planning stage?” And so for some reason, I ended up becoming chair of the planning committee for what's now Shady Spring Elementary School. We did our best. I had a wonderful experience working through all this, but I learned a great deal about the politics at all levels. We were a school designed by a fellow named Bill Gray who was the architect; it was his final school and he did a beautiful job. But the interesting thing was sitting down with him on a regular basis, I got together a group of supervisors and some classroom teachers. We literally went through each of the steps, and what we really needed. We won a lot of battles; some we didn't win. At that time, Baltimore County insisted upon two music rooms, as an example. I think in an elementary school today, we can do well with one. The other thing that's always been, I chuckle over this with my wife, and I talk about it on occasion, because we have a couple of very good friends who are speech pathologists. The standard was a speech pathologist had 150 square feet, but it had to be three separate small rooms. Every speech pathologist I've ever worked with said, “There are too many. You need the space but not that many rooms.” So they wanted more space, they did not need the walls. Shady Spring, incidentally, was a totally open space school, except for such designated areas. K.B.: Now, did you have input into that, or that was a fixed idea? G.H.: Yes, I often suggest that Baltimore County made only a few mistakes with me, and one was allowing me to select the staff. They became an outstanding group, and I think of the original fifteen, twelve ended up becoming principals down the line. And some are right now still working in Baltimore County. It was great selecting, and I did an awful lot of interviewing. As we got close to school opening, they wouldn't allow me to get into the school itself. I had just a few teaching openings. Of course, one of the more infamous ones was a young lady came in from West Virginia. I think she had been Miss West Virginia that year, and she looked very attractive. We didn't have any place to interview, so she said, “Well, can we go out and sit in my car?” I said, “Well, let's do two things at one time then. We'll sit in your car, but I'll show you the community. I'll drive around and talk to you.” So she drove around in her Corvette, and I'm sitting there, laughing and knowing there was going to be a lot made out of that. K.B.: Well, whatever happened to her? G.H.: We hired her. K.B.: Oh, you did? G.H.: Absolutely. You never give up on Miss West Virginia. And she became, she was a very good teacher. An excellent teacher. I learned also to try to get some others involved in the process. One of the evolutionary things for me was not to just make the selection myself but to get more than one opinion. So when I had an assistant principal, I'd get them involved. During my 33 years as principal, I used to then have teaching teams, two or three, at the same grade level where the candidates would work. Some would willingly join me and help filter candidates. I'm going to tell you that's a great way to get that input because they see things that sometimes you don't see as an administrator. K.B.: Well, sure. G.H.: So we got some wonderful, wonderful people at Shady Spring, that opened, even though it was a late opening too, it still worked very, very well. K.B.: What do you think about that concept of open space education? G.H.: Well, let me tell you also what's happened to Shady Spring; it has walls there now. I liked open space education. I liked it for the fact that you could have more flexibility with kids. I think the biggest detriment to its functioning was the adults. Adults did not know how to deal with such a setting. I think part of the problem was people would bring in this portable furniture, and it would be maybe five, six feet tall. That didn't stop the sound. One of the best things I found worked was to get the lower, the three foot type, because then you could always look at the child who was too loud, and all they needed was that reminder that others could hear them. K.B.: Interesting. G.H.: With all the teachers and their attitude, there was a great deal of camaraderie and working together. I thought it was great. Will we have it again? I'm not sure. But it met a purpose. The only people who criticized were people who didn't realize how it worked. I had to constantly show that to new parents and so forth. Parents would come in and probably were far louder than any child in the school. They thought they were using their playground voices. But I liked it, and unfortunately as I say, Shady Spring, I understand, has gone back and put up walls. K.B.: What other kinds of involvements did you have in Baltimore County Public Schools? Were you actively involved in principal groups? Did you have any kind of leadership responsibility outside the school setting? G.H.: Yes, I have always been involved with principal groups. In fact, at both the local and the state, I became president of AESA, Association of Elementary School Administrators, and I was always involved in that committee structure too. Later on in my career, not too many years later, I became state president of the elementary principals’ group (MAESP). To this day, I'm still serving as executive director of the elementary group in Baltimore County, and that's really more organizationally and to keep them going. We're having a lot of turnover today of people who are leaving, retiring. It's tough, it's very difficult today to get more and more trained, experienced people into these jobs. Because the demands of the job are just overwhelming. K.B.: It is overwhelming, and there are so many other possibilities right now. G.H.: For men and women. K.B.: Yes, for both. You've also stayed in touch with your graduating class from Towson University, and with the University itself. Would you talk a little bit about that, and roles that you've played in relationship to the University? G.H.: Yes, I'm a joiner. I enjoyed getting together with my classmates, and while at Towson I was president of the SGA, and also treasurer one year. Then after I left, I stayed active with the Alumni Board. I actually served as Alumni president for three years. I went back to campus on many, many occasions to support a cause, whether it was with athletics or whatever. I had an advantage of living in close proximity to the school, so I didn't have a lot of travel. I've never lived more than probably five miles from the University. I got to know all the presidents, and I had an opportunity while there in acting with the association. I was on the selection committee that brought Bob Caret to the campus. Well, not really to campus, because he was already here, but selecting him as Provost. And that was kind of an interesting and neat experience. K.B.: Yes, absolutely. G.H.: And it's proven that we've made a good decision. But no, I've tried to stay active, and I'm active there, but not as much today as I was. I am also active in other things in my own life, over and beyond Towson. K.B.: And here at Edenwald. G.H.: Here at Edenwald, a super retirement community in Towson, and for some reason, I'm president of the Resident's Association this year. K.B.: It's sort of like being a principal. A leadership position by any other name. G.H.: You don't necessarily gravitate to them; they kind of grab you sometimes. K.B.: Is there anything that we've forgotten to talk about in terms of your career in education that you really want to share with us? G.H.: I'm sure I could talk for hours on some of the wonderful experiences I've had, because I thoroughly enjoyed my jobs. I'm one of those. My wife and I had five children; I hope they enjoy their jobs in education, or outside of education, as much as I have. It leads me to the fact that about fifteen years ago now, at Thanksgiving dinner, I asked that beautiful question that dads always like to ask. I said, “Hey, tell me something. You all are doing well.” At that time, three were out of college, two were still in college. I said, “Tell me one thing, why didn't any of you choose education as a career?” K.B.: Yes, and what were their responses? G.H.: Our fourth boy spoke up, and he was the only one who spoke. “Dad, you work too long, it's not appreciated, and you don't make enough money anywhere in comparison to the hours you put into it.” Dead silence. And I said, “You know, I understand what you're saying, but one point you did not say is, ‘I enjoy my job.’” It was interesting, their perception, because when I was working, I never finished my work at school. I always brought work home; every night I worked at home. I'm sure my wife had to be a rather tolerant saint, because I took a lot of family time for that. You know, we took vacations, but still, there's just an awful lot to do. And the principals of today can't finish their jobs either. Unfortunately the workload is driving some people out in their early 50’s. They're leaving, “We can't do this anymore.” K.B.: Well, what would you say to other young people about choosing a career as a teacher? G.H.: I would strongly encourage them. I think that teaching is a wonderful profession. It's a noble interest. You have an honest, great way to give back to people, and you can work with young people and see growth. It is so interesting to see what they want to do in life. If you can channel their interests in some way, that's a wonderful, wonderful experience. So I would recommend teaching to anyone, if they truly would enjoy working with kids. K.B.: Thank you, thank you for sharing all of your history with us. G.H.: Thank you.