Mr. Bradley Dahl is the newest learning strategies (LS) teacher at Mayo High School. He helps support and provide resources to students who have learning disabilities or who need specific accommodations to give them their best learning experience. He is a funny, artistic and supportive guy worth getting to know more about.
Mr. Dahl lived in Montana with his wife and two children before recently moving to Minnesota. Mr. Dahl never planned to move to MN, but life events brought him here. His young daughter had a heart transplant and often they had to take long flights and car rides to the hospital in Seattle, WA. Transportation and medical bills were expensive, and times were tough. He had heard that the Mayo Clinic was doing revolutionary work in the science of growing a heart from scratch and knew that he had to be near to the Rochester Area. He began looking for schools to apply to in the Rochester area and finally got a teaching job at John Marshall High School. His family moved to Rochester, while Dahl was an LS teacher at JM for a year before transferring to Mayo this 2017 school year.
As many teachers seem to say, Mr. Dahl too never believed he would one day become a teacher. The turnaround he said came during his high school days watching the movie School of Rock. A quote from the movie left it’s mark, “Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym” (Dewey Finn – School House of Rock). This single quote changed how he thought because he knew it wasn’t true. This stayed with him as he grew up and made his careers choices. He wanted to dispel that myth. In college he majored in art as well as managed his college basketball team, The Bobcats.
He later became an interior designer in Seattle where he worked with architects to complete designs and selected furniture pieces for top quality construction projects. He felt that he was “at [his] heights in his twenties,” but it was during this time that the economy tanked and all of that slipped away. Mr. Dahl did not know what to do, so he moved back to his roots in Montana and met his wife in a small coffee shop. She was the one who encouraged him to go back to school and urged him to pursue his passion of teaching, so he did just that.
Dahl became a teacher because he feels he can make a real difference in a kid’s life, and that is what really matters to him. His greatest goal as a teacher and human is to instill into his student’s work ethic. He believes that modern culture has made many of us act entitled or wish to “have it all” without putting in the needed effort. He believes that when you work hard to achieve what you are dreaming for it feels much better than just being given it from the start. It is so much more rewarding and makes us humans more appreciative of what we have. Mr. Dahl lives his life with this belief in mind: “Life is hard but I am going to work harder to achieve my goals.”
So when you see him in the halls or a classroom, give a warm Spartan welcome to Mr. Bradley Dahl.