By Meghan Green, Lucy Levinson, and Anna McGurkin
Dr. Ashton
This year RPCS welcomes Dr. Ashton to the history department! He teaches 9th and 11th grade history and coadvises a group of 12th-grade students with Mrs. Yoder.
Regarding his love for history, Dr. Ashton said, “As to why I decided to be a historian... I'm a music lover, especially classical music and jazz… I wanted to know why does anyone dress up to go to the opera, and sit in a velvet-covered seat, why do we do that, but if we’re going to hear a rock concert, we wear a tee shirt and jeans…So, it was the history of that that I wanted to know about.” Dr. Ashton was curious as to why these cultural practices evolve differently.
In discussing his endeavors before RPCS, Dr. Ashton said, “I’ve had like five different careers: I started out in financial services. I worked in the arts for a number of years, doing fundraising mostly.” After leaving the arts, Dr. Ashton was a store manager at Starbucks in Cincinnati before he decided to go back to graduate school in history. “So, arts, coffee, history… my three main careers!” Ashton said.
It was not until after participating in it during graduate school that Dr. Ashton discovered he loved teaching. He said, “I never knew that I wanted to be a teacher, although, looking back on it, I think running a coffee shop was the best training I ever got in teaching.”
Dr. Ashton’s passion for high school teaching is palpable, something he realized after a few years of teaching at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins and Loyola University Maryland.
With this in mind, Dr. Ashton accepted his first high school teaching position in Pittsburgh. However, he said, “within months of moving to Pittsburgh, my wife and I...we both realized that we intensely missed Baltimore.” So, Dr. Ashton readily took advantage of the opportunity to move back to Baltimore and teach high school history at RPCS.
Dr. Ashton describes his enthusiastic first impression of RPCS, saying, “I love it. I love teaching.”
Roland Park students are “acculturated to be prepared,” Dr. Ashton mentioned what he has observed at traditionally all-girls schools. “What I see here is just this...willingness to take chances, to be bold.”
Something that Dr. Ashton is looking forward to this year is going to prom with his wife!
Ms. Blaum
This year, Roland Park welcomes a new college counselor, Ms. Blaum! Ms. Blaum earned an undergraduate degree from Ball State University and a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania in positive psychology. Over the past ten years, Ms. Blaum has served in various roles at multiple boarding schools, most recently at Virginia Episcopal School. Discovering a job opening at RPCS, a school with a strong curriculum and core values, felt serendipitous as Ms. Blaum had always wanted to live in the Baltimore/DC area.
So far, Ms. Blaum has been genuinely impressed by all the students she has met. She feels a sense of sisterhood, community, and tradition that she says “forms a place where, in everything they do, everyone seems excited to be excited.”
Over the past months, she has been getting involved at RPCS and thriving in new spaces on campus, one of which being her premiere as a Varsity field hockey coach. This fall, she led the team through a remarkably successful season and fostered meaningful relationships with the student-athletes.
Ms. Blaum loves her primary role as a college counselor, where she leads students through the college application process and oversees testing. She views the college process as positive and exciting, feeling lucky that her job allows her to highlight how each student is unique. While feelings of stress and anxiety are natural throughout application season, Ms. Blaum explains that students stumble upon a greater sense of gratitude, self-awareness, and confidence in exploring their options and identifying values.
Furthermore, she wants her office to feel like a “modesty-free zone,” where students are always welcome to come chat. Ms. Blaum says, “As women, we are taught to be modest and not to highlight the things we do really well. Getting comfortable with celebrating yourself and doing it out loud, not just in private, is so important.”
Ms. Blaum is so excited to grow into the RPCS family and the greater Baltimore community. She cannot wait to get to know everyone’s names, so if you see her in the hallway, be sure to give a friendly hello and introduce yourself! While you’re at it, for an impressive fun fact, ask her how many half marathons she ran in 2021; you won’t be disappointed.
Ms. Sharpe
This year at Roland Park, we are honored to welcome Ms. Sharpe as a new member of the English department! In classroom 112, you can find Ms. Sharpe analyzing The Catcher in the Rye in her ninth grade English course, teaching her senior elective, Counter-Cultural Collectives, or lending a helping hand to our seniors’ college essays. After growing up in the DC area, Ms. Sharpe traveled to Portland, Oregon, to receive an undergraduate degree from Reed College. Then, she went on to earn a Master’s degree in English at Cornell University, where she would eventually teach her first class.
In describing her role as a teacher, Ms. Sharpe says, “teaching is an intellectual and social challenge at the same time.” However, her love for English sparked a fire in her long before her passion for teaching. She has loved to read her entire life (War and Peace being her all-time favorite), so becoming an English teacher was a simple choice. She describes being an English teacher as “reading professionally and almost inspiring others to read professionally.”
Yet, Ms. Sharpe also excels outside the realm of teaching. She spent multiple years working in journalism and even wrote a nonfiction book about the growing reliance on prescription drugs called Coming of Age on Zoloft, which is rated an impressive four and a half stars on Amazon. Finally, Ms. Sharpe was accepted into Hopkins’ MFA fiction program in 2016 which brought her to heaven on earth—also commonly referred to as Baltimore.
Throughout her career, Ms. Sharpe has taught college-level classes but decided that she wanted a more personal connection with students, sparking her interest in teaching at an independent high school. Luckily for us, this allowed her to grace our halls, along with the hearts of many aspiring English fanatics.
On her first impressions of Roland Park, she says, “I’m impressed with the students; I'm impressed with how well they support each other, and how diligent they are.” She continued by noting that the kindness and ferocity of learning on campus particularly stood out to her, as well as the versatility of teachers. Her experiences with the Reds so far have been, she says, “definitely positive.”
Looking towards the future, Ms. Sharpe is excited to chaperone activities and see students beyond the learning environment. So if you see her at Spring Formal, make sure to say hi! Hopefully, someday soon, she will see her students without masks.
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