BY CLIFF SMELLEY
Telegraph Staff Writer
Ashley Dowd doesn’t think she’s yet become the best teacher she can be, which is why she was “shocked” to learn that she is the 2021-22 Teacher of the Year for the Bradford County School District.
Dowd, who’s in her third year at Bradford Middle School, said, every day at school is a learning experience for her. She becomes aware of what her colleagues are doing and uses that information so that she can become a better teacher.
For her, a Teacher of the Year honor sounds like something that should come at the end of a career.
“I still feel myself growing every year, so I don’t think I’m done,” Dowd said. “Teacher of the Year feels like a done thing, like you get Teacher of the Year when you’re done. You don’t get Teacher of the Year when you’re still growing as much as I am.”
Dream comes true after slight detour
Dowd, who teaches four classes of eighth-grade English language arts and spends two class periods coaching other teachers, is fulfilling a passion she had at a young age. In first grade, she wrote that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up so she could help children read.
“I spelled ‘read’ incorrectly,” Dowd said, laughing.
Following her graduation from Fleming Island High School in 2005 (she was a member of the school’s first graduating class), Dowd went to the University of Central Florida. She wasn’t planning on being a teacher by that point. She actually worked toward and earned a bachelor’s degree in Hospitality Management. The whole time she was going to school, she worked in restaurants, bars, hotels and golf clubs, gaining the experience to go along with her major.
A month before she was to graduate, however, Dowd decided she would continue going to school with the future goal of teaching. She earned a master’s degree in a teaching program for out-of-field students.
It was while working at the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando that Dowd decided her future wasn’t going to be “getting old behind a bar.”
“I realized that I was having a lot more fun playing with the kids at the hotel and teaching them silly dances than I was serving drinks,” Dowd said.
Dowd did tell some church-family friends she would work as a crew member on their yacht, so that’s what she did, traveling up and down the east coast for six years while working toward her master’s degree.
“It was like one last hurrah in hospitality management,” Dowd said.
Besides her time at Bradford Middle School, Dowd taught two years at Bradford High School. She’s also taught one year in Jacksonville, one year in Orlando and two years in Arkansas.
BMS is a school where Dowd feels she has flourished. She enjoys the support of school administrators and the friendliness she’s received from her colleagues, especially the other English Language Arts teachers.
“I’ve told a couple of people that I wasn’t a good teacher until I moved to this school,” she said.
Liking and loving middle-school kids
The joy Dowd derives from teaching comes from building relationships with her students. It’s what she believes is so important for those in her profession.
It’s not enough to simply be good at teaching content.
“My favorite professor in college said kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care,” Dowd said.
Caring about them means liking them, which Dowd said is more than having a love for them.
“There is a difference,” Dowd said. “I feel like everybody in this community loves kids. That’s just truth, but you have to like them every day.”
Dowd, with the exception of seventh grade, has taught children in all grades from sixth to 12th.
“I joke with kids that I’m afraid of seventh-graders,” she said.
What Dowd eventually discovered was that she had more fun teaching in middle school than high school. She laughed and said she and her fellow middle-school teachers are “a special kind of weird, for sure.”
All joking aside, middle-school teachers are catching children at a “pivotal” point in their lives, Dowd said.
“These kids can go two ways,” she said. “They can really decide to make it or not. This is the moment we need to catch them — before they decide to make all the mistakes.”
Dowd remembers her own experiences in eighth grade and how she often felt awkward and embarrassed.
“I just felt like everybody was looking at me,” Dowd said. “Everybody was judging.”
Now, though, Dowd realizes her classmates were all thinking the same thing, so she had no basis for feeling the way she did. She said she tells her students all the time, “Nobody’s paying attention to you. They’re too busy worrying about their own eighth-grade selves.”
“I tell them my own eighth-grade year was terrifying,” Dowd said, adding, “I tell them this all the time: ‘That’s why I’m here — to help you through the worst year I had.’”
Having the opportunity to build relationships with middle-school students is rewarding for Dowd because it allows her to see the “real people” in kids, which she described as “neat.”
“They just get such bad reputations, but they’re really cool people,” she said. “They don’t know who they are yet. It’s kind of fun to see from the beginning of the year to the end of the year who they turn out to be.”
Teaching is about more than students
When asked what her definition of a “Teacher of the Year” would be, Dowd said “somebody who not only has mastered a couple facets of teaching, but who can also help other teachers.”
In fact, Dowd said her favorite part of the day is when she’s fulfilling her role as a teacher coach. She may be helping them, but they, in turn, are helping her.
“Every day, I learn something from another teacher,” Dowd said.
Dowd said if teachers find that something they do works really well, they should share it with their colleagues so they can all become the best teachers they can be. As an example, Dowd said the seventh- and eighth-grade English language arts teachers at BMS are working “super closely together.”
“Now, it’s a think tank of four, super-capable women,” Dowd said. “It’s neat.”
She may be a teacher coach, but Dowd will leave you with the impression that her colleagues deserve as much credit for her being Teacher of the Year as she does.
“They’ve all got better ideas than I do,” Dowd said.
Dowd admitted that she’s honored to be selected as the district-wide Teacher of the Year, but she also feels a little embarrassed.
“It made me feel good, of course,” she said. “I feel super respected, but also I don’t want anybody to ever think that I think I deserve it. That just feels wrong.”
