Most people spend a lifetime trying to master one thing. The science classroom and the concert stage rarely share a calendar, let alone a person. Diosdado “Dodie” Deluna Rabanso Jr. has spent nearly two decades refusing to choose between them — and somehow excelling at both.
For seventeen years, teaching has been the center of his life, thirteen of those in the Philippines before he carried his chalk and his curriculum across the Pacific. He graduated from Leyte Normal University in Tacloban City in 2009 with degrees in both elementary and secondary education, the latter in General Science. The credentials kept stacking: in 2024, he earned a Master of Education in Science Education from the American College of Education in Indianapolis, finishing with a 4.0 GPA and Distinct Honors.
But to leave it at the diplomas would be to miss the person entirely.
The teacher who couldn’t sit still
In the Philippines, Dodie became the kind of educator whose influence spilled past his own classroom walls. He advised award-winning school papers, picking up the 2019 National Outstanding School Paper Adviser recognition for Region VIII and the 2020 Gawad Dyornalismo national title. He coached students through co-curricular competitions, wrote curriculum, and trained fellow teachers across Eastern Visayas as a regional trainer for the Department of Education.
Then, in 2022, he took the leap that so many Filipino educators dream about and dread in equal measure. He became a J-1 teacher in the United States. Today he teaches 8th-grade science in Kissimmee, Florida — and recently earned a distinction that bridges his classroom instincts with the future: he was named AI Madness Challenge Champion for Charter Schools USA, beating out representatives from more than 100 charter schools across four states.
“His innovative use of artificial intelligence in education earned him top honors,” reads his record — a line that says as much about restlessness as it does about achievement. The man does not coast.
The voice he never put away
Here is where the story turns. Long before Florida, before the master’s degree, there was a voice.
Dodie sang. In Tacloban, that voice won him competition after competition — Doble Kara Champion in 2015, DepEd Tacloban’s Your Face Sounds Familiar in 2016, Teachers’ Got Talent in 2022. These might have stayed hometown trophies, the pleasant hobby of a man with a real career.
They didn’t. After moving to the U.S., his musical life detonated. He won the 2024 Tawag ng Tanghalan PhilFest in Tampa Bay, which opened doors to stages he’d only watched from the audience. He performed alongside Marcelito Pomoy in 2024 and Gigi De Lana in 2025. He won Osceola Idol in 2025, then took the Asia Pacific Idol crown in Tampa Bay the same year. By March 2026, he was singing the U.S. National Anthem to a Tampa Bay crowd — a Filipino educator delivering America’s song.
One of his most memorable moments came when he shared a stage with David Pomeranz during the 25th-anniversary celebration of “On This Day,” singing beside the man who wrote it.
When the encore is for someone else
What separates Dodie from a gifted weekend performer is what he does with the spotlight once it finds him.
His concerts have funded the Hospital on Wheels medical mission in the Philippines through Friends Who Care. Proceeds have gone toward building the Adoration Chapel at Light of Christ Parish Church and constructing classrooms at Barra Elementary School. Most recently, a three-day benefit series with another singing educator — staged in Gainesville and Dunedin, Florida — raised more than $7,000 for Filipino teachers and the same medical outreach program. His performances have carried him through South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, less a touring act than a traveling cause.
It would be easy to read all this as a man who simply can’t say no — to a competition, a stage, a worthy fundraiser. But spend time with the arc of his life and a quieter logic emerges. The teaching, the singing, the curriculum-writing, the fundraising: they’re all the same instinct pointed in different directions. Give people something. Leave them better than you found them.
Whether he’s explaining photosynthesis to eighth-graders, holding a note in front of a sold-out hall, or handing a check to a medical mission, the assignment hasn’t changed. The proof is in two stages he refuses to leave — and the single purpose that keeps drawing him back to both.
