But George is not acting when he is teaching. He is one human being speaking to the individual heart and brain of each student. All of us who are close to him know this. We ourselves have been learning from him for years.

––Margaret Sullivan, Administrative Assistant atCenter Stage Touring Co.

Reference to Br. William Abel, Principal at Cardinal Gibbons High School

June 1969

George began to materialize his teaching ideologies when he was hired in the fine arts department at Cardinal Gibbons High School in 1969. He laid the groundwork of trust, earnestly speaking to the future of every student and idea in his classroom. This foundation was paramount for the expressiveness required in the performing and fine arts courses that he taught. With both guidance and space, George's students found personal meaning and a shared sense of ownership within their productions and projects. They learned a level of self-efficacy, truly believing that both the things they did and the way they did them mattered.

At Gibbons, George developed a multidisciplinary course for first-year students that was team-taught by faculty members across performing arts, religion, and music departments. It was his innate ability to step back, to "un-compartmentalize" that facilitated ways of learning outside of normalized curricula. In George's educational practice, there was no fitting a student to a program or a topic into a course, or even recreating a system. There was no system; no mold from which to cast his own course.

There was no measuring accomplishment with a yardstick or a scale. Success was this gorgeous, nebulous, gossamer-fine thing that was rooted in process and collaboration. Progress was defined by connection and commitment. The work was in the doing, not just getting it “done”. There was no box to fit in or outside of in George’s class. He didn't teach to encourage others to think outside the box: he taught as if he had never seen a box––a methodology that would serve as yet another throughline to his life.

He quickly showed us, the rest of the faculty, and the students, that the way to 'reach' students was not merely through innovative educational structuralism, but through personal involvement with the people for whom you have some responsibility.

His life was an open book, and students felt free to inquire about anything, knowing that they could talk freely and be understood. His own home was open to anyone who sought him there. He was a help and a guide in the truest sense of the term.

––Frank De Monaco, Director of Music at St. Bernard's Church and School

1972

Perhaps one of the greatest catalysts for George's personal doctrine of collective growth was his directorship of the New Community Farm School in Coburn, Pennsylvania, from 1972 to 1973.

George had just graduated from the University of North Carolina with a M.ED in guidance and counseling from the Department of Human Development and Learning. At the end of his graduate program, he had participated in one of his first un-museum "exhibitions": a booth on the UNC campus where he and his counseling techniques class sold advice for a nickel. Out of this display of trust in the capacity of people, and the power of their conversations, came meaning, care, and closeness.

The Farm School was a highly experiential learning community that attracted many high school aged students who did not succeed in traditional school systems. The school operated on a democratic forum of intention-setting, guided by respect for one's personal goals and needs, in symposium with others'. Students and teachers worked together to cook, clean, study, and care for the farm where they lived. The school operated year-round, so students could set their own individual semesters that accounted for family, travel, and obligations outside of the Farm School. Class schedules were flexible, and proposed collectively. Tuition was tiered by need, and the intent was that no student would be turned away.

In archived journals, Farm School students wrote about the sense of pride that came from designing menus for their shared meals, caring for the school's livestock, running errands in town as a class, and re-thinking policies and protocols for farm operations––in addition to learning philosophy, poetry, American Sign Language, and a variety of other serviceable subjects that were rarely integrated into traditional high school programs.

In a world that consistently rewards ego, alienating forms of professionalism, power tactics, hierarchies, and negative reinforcement––in and outside the classroom –– George understood that eliminating hierarchy in the classroom opens the opportunity for deeper, more transparent, and more intuitive relationships in the future.

At The Farm School, where the students and teachers lived side by side developing the learning and living together, everything was a part of the learning. The world they lived in became the classroom –– a shared place for nourishment, discourse, fulfillment, creativity, ease, experimentation, and authenticity. A proclamation of equity, and mutualism. A practice of faith in others, and a perpetual gesture of gratitude. A quiet healing, and a joyful movement.

One of the things that was so important to George and I was the feeling of the teacher. You can be taught the mechanics, but that's all it becomes. And my impression was that most of [the teachers] just taught the mechanics. George and I did not.

You have to want to do this for your fellow human being. And he had that.

––Emily Lipsitz, Co-Teacher for Career Oriented Program, Baltimore County Public Schools

Audio Interview
July 16, 2021

For ten years, George directed and expanded the Baltimore County Public School Career Oriented Program. This initiative placed underserved students––considered high-risk for a variety of legitimate and illegitimate reasons––in traditional classes in the morning, and in volunteer employment opportunities in the afternoon. It was a program that required an unorthodox level of faith in students that had been repeatedly deemed undisciplined and unreliable.

Steered by George's unwavering attentiveness to individual's gifts, needs, and potential, the program was a success. But much like the less than satisfactory marks on George's evaluations, I think it is the pain points of the program that provide the greatest testament to George's visionary teaching ethics.

An Arbutus Junior High School student working at a nursing home in the 1978 Career Oriented Program was not meeting her training sponsor's expectations. Rather than conclude that the issue was a lacking work ethic or an unworkable behavior, George insisted that the student was suffering from feelings of inadequacy. To help her feel a greater sense of power and assertiveness, George proposed that he give the student greater verbal reinforcement in her morning classes while the training sponsor assign her a special task with constant verbal praise.

In a 1983 iteration of the program, a student from Johnnycake Junior High School was working at a local library in the afternoons, but had failed his first semester of morning classes. Rather than consider probation from the employment afternoons or removal from the program, George arranged an agreement in which the student would spend the first hour of his afternoon employment completing homework from his morning classes.

Such were "successful experiments" according to George's evaluations. Of course they were. A generative person incites change, already loving the versions of people that they may never get to meet.

George is always open to anything that will connect him with others. That's part of his intuition, and that's part of what's driven him.

––Bill McQuay, former high school student of and subsequent friend of George,

Audio Producer for Cornell Lab of Ornithology and formerly of NPR

Audio Interview
September 12, 2021

There are so many things a parent has to tell a child, though most of them can’t be said. You have to be there, want to be there. But life happens, and you can’t be.

For George, it was divorce. A painful separation turned a home into an empty box; once colorful walls were painted white again. His four-year-old son would be raised away from him, and so he had to find a way to share meaning over distance; to care through objects.

George began to assemble packages to send to his son. A father became a curator through an impossible game of show-and-tell––in which a parent demonstrates the entire volume of his love within the parameters of a shoebox.

A newspaper clipping. Something soft that feels like a hug. A book to explore a subject mentioned on a whim, and then mentioned again. An old photo holding a shared memory. A puzzle to piece the time. Something left behind yet not forgotten. Something that grows. Something that can endure small hands learning to be careful. Something to share with new friends. This to inspire laughter. This to fill the silence. This to hold space. Not too heavy. Not too big, and not so small that it can't bear weight.

Is the ceramic cushioned enough? Will the potion spill onto the comic book? Will the latest record break? Can you hear me? Can this shirt be wrapping paper? Will it still fit? Will it all fit? How does love fit?

Take it to the post office; it’s too heavy. Take something out; it’s too light. Blow a kiss in, a hug. It’s just right.

Send.

This is the first unspoken rule of curating: no box is big enough to capture it all. We have to instead trust that so much can come from so little, and tell our stories using whatever we have. At the time, all George had was a box. But he would never curate in a box again.