By Andrew Mollenauer
Photo by Andrew Mollenauer
SPOTLIGHT: Merrill Alumna’s Passion For Journalism Lives On In Her Career Teaching High School English
After earning two degrees in preparation for her teaching career, Ayesha Ahmad took a detour through the graduate program at University of Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism.
Now a high school English teacher at Sandy Spring Friends School in Montgomery County, Ahmad taught elementary school briefly in Raleigh before coming to Maryland in 2000 to pursue journalism.
“I decided at that time that I did not want to teach,” Ahmad said. “And so I [said,] ‘let me just try journalism.’”
Ahmad, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, thoroughly enjoyed her time at Merrill, including a semester-long reporting capstone covering the Eastern Shore with Capital News Service’s Annapolis bureau. But the rewarding experience wasn’t without challenges unique to someone of her identity — a Muslim woman in America a year after 9/11.
In fall 2002, covering the closure of a Black & Decker plant in Easton, Maryland, Ahmad was stopped by two police officers who said they were responding to a report of a “suspicious-looking person of Middle Eastern descent.”
“That is the phrase that I’ll never forget,” Ahmad said. The employee at the facility’s gate had denied her entry when she identified herself as a reporter and asked to interview workers.
“They were absolutely awful to her,” said Adrianne Flynn, director of the CNS Annapolis bureau at the time. “I was absolutely shocked and appalled. She just took it all with grace, which I found amazing.”
Ahmad stood outside the plant, holding a sign asking passersby whether she could interview them for her story. She eventually got her quotes from customers at the nearby McDonald’s.
But perhaps that adversity yielded the perspective she holds today as she aims to pass on her wisdom to her ninth graders.
“You can’t really understand the truth without understanding what is reality for people who have different experiences in America,” Ahmad said.
Ahmad approached her reporting with a humility that resonated with UMD friend Nashiah Ahmad (no relation).
“The passion she showed when reporting, especially on social justice issues, inspired me,” Nashiah Ahmad said. “I imagine she has taken that same passion and applied it to her teaching career.”
Ayesha Ahmad said that amid current events, she sometimes says to herself, “I kind of wish I was in a newsroom right now.” Still, she’s at peace with her decision to be a teacher.
“I feel like I can do more to put light out into the world to put more truth out into the world … as a teacher,” Ahmad said. “It suits me better at this point [and] I am where I need to be. I think that journalism as a career challenged me a lot. Maybe I could’ve gone further in it, but … I needed to pick something and move on and I think I picked the right thing because there’s so much that I love about what I’m doing now.”
When Ahmad transitioned from journalism in 2006, after three years writing for The Gazette in Laurel, she did so with clarity and confidence. She said her choice to leave the field was due to starting a family and needing a change of pace conducive to being fully present. But she entered motherhood and teaching having taken away key lessons from journalism. She’s run her own photography business in the years since leaving The Gazette and still writes in her free time. Shooting photos, she said, is one of her “three greatest passions.”
More than 20 years later and now in retirement, Flynn thinks highly of Ahmad as she did back then. She said her former student set the standard for those facing the same obstacles in journalism.
“She was creative, elegant, graceful, calm under fire, and an excellent, dogged reporter,” Flynn said. “She had to overcome a lot just to be a reporter. I don’t know that she consciously thought about her role as representing Muslim women in journalism. She certainly had to grow into that role.”
Even in a classroom of high schoolers whom she teaches dystopian and world literature, her passion for journalism lives on — and influences her lessons.
“My sort of drive in teaching is very much around how the children learn to interact with stories around them,” Ahmad said. “The journalism experience has just become a part of who I am.”