History Teacher

Robert J. Hewes, 64, teacher, guidance counselor Robert J. Hewes, who worked for 30 years in Anne Arundel County schools as a high school history teacher, then a guidance counselor, died of pancreatic cancer Friday at his Pasadena home. He was 64. Born in Baltimore and raised in Linthicum Heights, Mr. Hewes was a 1955 Brooklyn Park High School graduate. He earned a bachelor's degree from what is now Towson University and a master's degree in counseling from the Johns Hopkins University.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - When they vote today in Iraq's presidential referendum, residents of the middle-class neighborhoods along Palestine Street will come to the Tasmani Primary School. Saladin Fadhal, the person in charge of the polling place, will be ready for them. He spent yesterday overseeing the final preparations, having commandeered the principal's office, where four portraits of President Saddam Hussein adorn the wall behind his desk. As described by Fadhal, a Hussein pin on his shirt, the referendum is simplicity itself and an exercise in Iraqi democracy: Iraq's 11.5 million registered voters can check "yes" or "no" on a paper ballot asking whether Hussein should serve another seven-year term.

Frederick Leist Jr., a retired St. Paul's School for Boys faculty member and Navy lieutenant commander, died of complications from a stroke Tuesday at Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center & Hospital. The Roland Park resident was 76. Mr. Leist taught history at the Brooklandville school for 20 years and often infused his lectures with personal observations of world affairs. Born in Baltimore and raised in Stoneleigh, he was long fascinated by history. As a boy, he frequently visited the Confederate Soldiers Home in Pikesville and listened to aged Civil War veterans tell their stories.

Zillah Ingram taught her ninth-grade class at Wilde Lake High School in suburban Columbia about the global economy. She showed students how much it costs to make a pair of sneakers overseas and the huge markup that consumers in industrial nations are willing to pay. The students, some of whom would readily pay $100 for a basketball jersey, weren't immediately impressed. "They're just so caught up in the materialism that they're spending whatever they have to be in style," the history teacher said, the same motive that has led adults to act wrongly or criminally in the cases that toppled Enron Corp.

The strategy was formulating in Bennie Anderson's mind. Anderson had his job as a high school history teacher in St. Louis during the summer. Now, all he needed was a way to reach his students by using a non-conventional method, something he was working on shortly before the Ravens called and invited him to training camp. "A lot of people will appreciate history more if you change the way it's taught. As long as I can change the way it is taught, then I can influence the kids," Anderson said.

NAPERVILLE, Ill. - William Hector doesn't just teach high school students about U.S. history. He teaches them about life - and how they can save lives. "If we could just increase organ donations, thousands of lives could be saved every year," Hector says. "It's the most important thing I can teach students." It's a subject the 53-year-old knows a lot about. He was diagnosed with diabetes as a high school sophomore, and his kidneys failed in 1985. After a 13-month wait, he received a kidney transplant - only to have his pancreas shut down, requiring a pancreas transplant a year later.

A week ago he was just Dan Jones, teacher, a regular guy who likes running and hanging out at a tavern in his Little Italy neighborhood. How quickly things change. As of Thursday, when the latest issue of People magazine hit the stands, Dan Jones, guy next door, became one of People's 100 Most Eligible Bachelors, appearing on the same page as talk show host Conan O'Brien and home run king Mark McGwire. It's been a bit disconcerting for the 25-year-old Jones, who's already received considerable ribbing from his colleagues at the University of Houston, where he's training teachers until the end of July.

Ellen Berney Hirschland, art history teacher, trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art and great-niece of Baltimore's famed Cone sisters, died of complications of pneumonia and cancer Friday while traveling near St. Moritz, Switzerland. She was 80 and lived in Great Neck on Long Island, N.Y.As a niece of art collectors Claribel and Etta Cone, Mrs. Hirschland was a frequent visitor at their Eutaw Place apartments, where the walls were filled with the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne.After the deaths of the Cones -- Claribel in 1929, Etta in 1949 -- Mrs. Hirschland lectured on their life and collecting.

I was feeling pretty smug Monday after the Maryland Senate passed Sen. Perry Sfikas' bill to mandate study of the Irish potato famine in the public schools -- until I realized I didn't actually know anything about said famine. Couldn't name the decade, although I knew the century. Wasn't sure if the potato was in short supply, or if it was the only thing available when everything else was scarce.(I could spell potato, which put me one up on a former vice president.)So I decided to make a list of every bit of history I remember studying in Maryland's public schools.

Larry Benicewicz teaches science, but he lives for the blues.The Lindale-Brooklyn Park Middle School teacher has amassed a collection of more than 100,000 recordings -- all 45s -- of blues artists. He uses his vacations to trace the roots of the blues down the Mississippi River and has brought local blues artists to play for his students.He has immersed himself in the history of the music so deeply that national and international blues publications consider him an authority on the subject.