Core Mentor Intern, Subject Area Specialist -- Photography, Geology, Ranching -- Tammy Hoherz
“If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.” Sam Adams
Tammy grew up all over the US. During those early years, her experiences as a child in summer YMCA camps in Orange County CA and the mentorship and learning experiences she had in high school as an Army JROTC student in Tyler TX, at John Tyler HS in the mid-1980s under Major Benny Archuleta was a major influence on her. She attended college in her mid-20s first at Bellevue Community college in Bellevue Washington in the mid-90s.
While at college, she worked through school doing urban tree removal and landscaping work in the surrounding greater Seattle communities. She later transferred to the University of Wyoming at Laramie where she worked toward an undergrad BS in geology. Tammy was profoundly affected by the methods of seminar-style instruction she had received as an undergraduate geology major at UWYO.
The department was full of professors who taught geology as a way of doing. Major classes were boots on the ground fieldwork doing the traditional work of field geologists. Her field camp experience in the summer of 1999 through UWYO profoundly molded her vision of what learning truly was. But with one semester to graduate with her BS in geology, as it does for many of us life happened and she transferred to the teacher’s college Dickinson State University at Dickinson ND. This came along with a life’s epiphany. She switched majors to become a teacher.
In the summer of 2000, Tammy married David Hoherz, a rancher, In the Fall of 2001, she graduated from Dickinson State University with a B.S. in Secondary Science Education in Composite Natural Science. Together they raised their four girls, who are now grown, with families of their own.
Tammy taught middle and high school science in several small rural schools in southwest North Dakota for 16 years. Over the years, Tammy strived to ignite a passion for learning in young people as her former mentors had for her.
After several years in public education, she began to look at herself as a coach and a mentor, and not simply as a tool to deliver knowledge, but as a guide to young people in finding their purpose and passions.
Moving through her career she taught Anatomy, Physiology, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Geology, her teaching style continued to evolve.
Tammy also had a passion for photography. Since 2002, she worked obsessively to teach herself the technical skills of portrait photography. Over the years, she became proficient in various Lightroom and Photoshop editing techniques. In addition to teaching, she developed business in portraiture and wedding photography. She used her skills in photography to document her love for the traditional way of life of running a commercial cow-calf operation that she and David live on the family ranch near the little village of Bentley ND. In 2017 then moving the operation to Battle Creek just a few miles west of Dayville Oregon.
Tammy photographed and filmed ranch work, traveling to spring brandings in several surrounding states, making a small business out of producing calendars and short films. To do that she taught herself the craft of digital printing creating artisanal prints for clients.
Because demand that digital photography puts on computers Tammy found it necessary to teach herself to build and service them. She maintains her website: hoherzranch.com as well as a photography business Facebook page under Hoherz Ranch Photography.
You should be getting a sense that Tammy has not only solid content knowledge but the wisdom that only come with boots on the ground experience in the subject areas of technology, photography, orienteering, geology, mycology, rocks, and mineral identification and rockhounding, ranching, horsemanship, identification and harvesting of wild edible plants, homestead subjects like canning and gardening on a larger scale, and so much more. NOLI will allow Tammy to share her passions with her students and explore other fields with her students.
Her love for teaching was at odds with the long-established current educational model in America and knew there had to be a better way, there had to a school that students should flourish because of the model and not in spite of it, a school that truly prepared students to be prosperous adults. In the winter of 2020 after 17 years of teaching public school, she discovered NOLI. She has a passion for truly coaching her students to reach their greatest good and NOLI School will give her the freedom and tools to do just that.
All though she currently holds a teaching license for all science classes grades 5-12 in North Dakota and Integrated Science for grades K-12 in Oregon, she currently working to earn NOLI Core Instructor and Site Director Certifications, with a long-range goal of establishing their cattle ranch and homestead as an affiliated NOLI Site.
