A Genius Among Us
Dos Pueblos High School Teacher Earns the Honor of a Lifetime
Imagine for a moment that it is the early morning, you haven’t had your coffee yet, your workday looms ahead, the sun is just starting to wake the world up, and your home phone rings. On the other end is a man’s voice. You don’t recognize it at all; in fact, you were expecting someone else all together. Nonetheless, you carry on with the conversation as the mystery voice excitedly starts talking about “Genius Awards” and money, lots of free money with your name on it and absolutely zero strings attached. Your mind boggles as you hang up the receiver and it begins to set in that you have just been given half a million dollars with the sole purpose of making the world a better place.
Such was the weird and wonderful experience of Dos Pueblos (DP) High School physics teacher Amir Abo-Shaeer earlier this month. The primary figure behind DP’s esteemed and award-winning Engineering Academy since it was founded in 2002, Abo-Shaeer was officially announced this week as a 2010 MacArthur Fellow — an annual honor bestowed upon roughly two dozen U.S. citizens who, according to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Web site, “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.”
Commonly called the “Genius Award,” the fellowship — which has 23 honorees this year including Abo-Shaeer — is really more of an investment in the brilliance and good nature of the recipients themselves, as it gives each $500,000, paid out over five years, to do with as they wish with absolutely nothing expected in return. “You can’t apply for something like this and there is no actual application, so, yeah, I was surprised,” said Abo-Shaeer. “I really had no idea. … Even once I realized what [the fateful phone call] was about, it still seemed so unrealistic. I kept thinking, ‘I don’t get things like this, nor do any other public school teachers for that matter.’” In fact, in the three decades that the grants have been given, this blissfully non-cell-phone-owning husband and father of one is the first “teacher” to win the award.
