Bored engineer becomes passionate high-school teacher: Q&A with Amir Abo-Shaeer

“There is no Liz Brooks,” came a man’s voice over the phone. Amir Abo-Shaeer had agreed to speak to a graduate student—Brooks—for a story she was writing for her campus newspaper. So he was confused when, at the appointed time—7am one morning last fall—he got a different call. But after a while, the not yet fully awake Abo-Shaeer understood that the supposed newspaper interview was part of an elaborate pretext to coordinate informing him and the other 2010 MacArthur Foundation fellows that they had won so-called “genius awards.”

Abo-Shaeer grew up in Santa Barbara, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in mechanical engineering—both from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)—he spent a few years working in industry. He then switched to teaching high-school physics, ending up at the public school he himself had graduated from, Dos Pueblos High School .

Since starting at Dos Pueblos in 2001, Abo-Shaeer has been garnering increasing acclaim for the engineering academy he founded within the school. He is planning a program for teachers to come spend a sabbatical year at the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy so “they can learn how to do it and then go home and replicate it on a small scale, without wandering in the dark like I did.”

Crown Publishers is set to release Neal Bascomb’s The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts in March. The book follows Abo-Shaeer and academy seniors as they participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition . Academy slots are in high demand, the teaching approach is innovative, and graduates are getting into good colleges. Perhaps most attention-getting is that, in a field that struggles for gender parity, fully half of the students at Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy are girls.

Academy seniors will compete in March and April in the 20th anniversary of the FIRST Robotics Competition. The challenge this year is to build a robot that hangs inflated shapes at different heights in a game akin to giant tic-tac-toe. Winning the robotics competition in their third year of competing “solidified everything,” Abo-Shaeer says, and helped raise money for the academy’s expansion.

Last summer the academy broke ground on a new $6 million building. With more space, better machine shops, and fancier computer centers will come more students, new teachers, and a project-based curriculum that interweaves physics, engineering, and art.

Physics Today‘s Toni Feder caught up with Abo-Shaeer by phone.

PT: Why did you switch from a career in engineering to teaching high school?

ABO-SHAEER: I worked in aerospace and in telecommunications for about four years. In aerospace, I basically did research and development on different kinds of solar panel arrays. In telecommunications, it was just really boring stuff—that is what made me leave engineering. It was great that I had that job, because I really don’t think I was cut out to be an engineer. I like inventing and home-project engineering, but sitting in a cubicle and doing engineering proper didn’t suit me.

I had a very positive mentor in high school, my band teacher. I felt that high school was the best match in terms of the skill set I had and the student population I wanted to work with.

PT: How did you make the switch?

ABO-SHAEER: I just quit. I applied to UCSB’s teacher-education program to get a credential. I wanted to stay in Santa Barbara, and all three high schools were hiring in science. I chose Dos Pueblos not because it was my alma mater but because they had received a grant to pilot an engineering program. That is what I have developed.

PT: Tell me about the academy you founded.

ABO-SHAEER: Starting from the beginning, I had this chunk of money that was to develop curricula and a plan. I spent the first year investigating—I went to schools, looked at what other people were doing. Then I started to try to create curriculum. I found out what the process was in the state of California, and it’s not easy. The UC system insists on approving courses that it will count as college preparatory. That put a very substantial bureaucracy between me and what I knew was good curriculum. It’s not that the UC system was trying to stifle things, but in standardizing the process, innovation was not honored.

I decided to accept that there were constraints, and to stop contemplating flying to Sacramento to yell at someone.

The academy is a school within a school. In their first year, students take only engineering physics in the academy. I taught physics, but would infuse projects into it, and make it engineering physics. It bothered me that the UC system would not give the kids credit for engineering physics. In their second year, they do a project-based learning class. The third year is AP [advanced placement] physics. I needed to create a senior class, and I wanted something competitive and exciting. I also knew that the senior year had more flexibility, because at that point the students had already created their transcripts that would get them into college. I could create a nonapproved course. I made the title robotics, so if it was on their transcript, MIT wouldn’t care whether it was UC-approved or not.

The senior course was to design and build a robot, which would be entered in the FIRST Robotics Competition, a national competition. We run the course like a business. The seniors manage all aspects with me—web design, grant writing, graphic arts. I teach students to take a conceptual idea to completion. That is what they need to be successful in the world. High school doesn’t teach that. College doesn’t either.

PT: How does the robotics competition work?

ABO-SHAEER: You create a robot for a game. The robots are 150 pounds, they are real machines, they are on wheels. They do sports. We get a rule book, pour through it, and approach it from two perspectives. The robot design perspective is, what can the robot do to meet the challenge? And the game theory perspective is, how is this game going to be played? The way the design process works is the students break up into four electrical/electromechanical subgroups, an electrical group, and a programming subgroup.

The third year, we won. That year, the game was like NASCAR, only you had to pick up a ball that was 40 inches in diameter, bring it with you, and throw it over an 8-foot fence every time it went around the track. We had a forklift that would expand from a 4-foot to 15-foot robot in two seconds.

When we first got there, I realized that what I was doing was completely not what anyone else was doing that was competing in this competition. It was mainly clubs. Some teachers got stipends, and the kids were not getting course credit. People thought that I was insane, because the club teams had kids that were freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, so when the seniors graduated, they didn’t lose all their intellectual capital. But for my team, recruiting is not an issue, because this year’s juniors will be next year’s team.

After our team participated a few times, the organization behind the competition came to my classroom. They said, “We don’t understand how you have a team that starts out with brand new kids each year, and are able to compete at the level of teams that have existed for 15 years. They have long-term mentors, and everyone knows what they are doing.”

At that point, I had three competitions under my belt. The fact that my students were all seniors was beneficial because they were mature, they had already applied for college, they knew they would only get to do this once, and they were able to throw all their effort into the robots.

PT: Where did things go from here?

ABO-SHAEER: It was the robotics competition and watching my students that made me realize how backward what I was doing was because of the constraints put upon us. It was extremely frustrating. I applied for a $3 million grant from the state of California available for upgrading or building facilities related to any of a dozen or so sectors identified [by the state] as being engines behind the economy—agriculture, technology, tourism, etc. One of them is engineering. With some parents from the academy, I formed a foundation to raise matching funds. We got the grant.

The academy is going to grow from 128 kids—32 in each grade level—to 400. Kids apply in 8th grade, and we always have three times the number of qualified applicants as we have spaces.

PT: The academy is known for having an equal number of girls and boys. How do you achieve that?

ABO-SHAEER: When I taught physics classes, they were basically half girls. Put in the word engineering, and bam! it was down to two. So, I brought girls from the program to the junior high schools during our recruitment presentation. I made it overtly obvious that girls were involved. When I looked at the questionnaires we had given out, I saw that way more girls had said they were interested than had followed up with applications. So I called the families of those girls—and most of the people said they had no idea their daughter would be interested. The number of girls in our applicant pool went up. Now it’s strong and we don’t have to do anything anymore.

PT: What about minorities?

ABO-SHAEER: We have an applicant pool that is only as diverse as the people that are qualified to be in the program based on what the education system has done. Our diversity in terms of minorities is increasing, but it’s not a success story yet.

PT: What are your plans for the expanded academy?

ABO-SHAEER: My new curriculum was approved by the UC system [in November]. We are doing a serially integrated curriculum—this is new, I think I made it up. A kid takes one course their freshman year, and gets fractional credit in physics, fractional credit in engineering, and fractional credit in art. So over the course of three years, they get one year of each.

What is great about this is that now there is no race to get through specific content. Instead, you figure out what physics skills, what art skills, and what engineering tools you need for a specific project. The idea is built around the premise that the students are learning whatever they are learning at any given time to make a given project successful.

PT: What are examples of projects?

ABO-SHAEER: One teaches the mundane concept of vectors. Students will have to use a milling machine to make an artistic project that has curved features. The only way you can get curved features is if you understand the relationship between Cartesian and polar coordinates, which is going to require you to understand vectors.

Another example: I need to teach kids about equilibrium and force balance, so I have them make a mobile. First they will learn the equation for equilibrium and balance and torque. Then they design artistic elements, then they weigh the elements. If it does not balance, they can go back to their equations and see why not.

The projects are all two weeks, done in pairs or alone. I have made up about 30 of these projects so far. I worked with an art teacher. Our goal was, we would not compromise physics, we would not compromise art, and we would not compromise engineering. If any of those were compromised, or if it seemed fake, we wouldn’t do it.

PT: Why art?

ABO-SHAEER: My hope is that by infusing art into it, and saying, look, we are going to be creating art projects and relating it to science, I think a whole new set of people are going to be attracted into this program.

PT: Are you preparing people to be scientists? Engineers?

ABO-SHAEER: No. I want people to have a positive experience with their science and understand how stuff can all relate together. I do not have a mission to get people to go into science and engineering, but because of the positive experience they have, they do.

I tell people that the type of thinking we require in the program is the type of thinking required in the world to be successful. It’s problem solving.

PT: When you switched to teaching, did you have ambitions of the scope you are achieving?

ABO-SHAEER: No. I was just excited about helping students. I was looking to teaching as something where I could give back, do something fun, and have a lifestyle that was supportive of my creativity. Eventually, all of my creativity ended up being directed toward the program.

PT: Did your pay plummet when you left industry to teach?

ABO-SHAEER: I did have to take a pay cut, but it hasn’t been all that bad because I am director of this program. The difference is that engineers are salaried, and I get paid hourly. I work as many hours as an engineer, not less like a teacher typically does. In the end I am not worse off, and I am having a ton more fun.

What I try to tell students is that you have to follow what you want to do, and it will work out. In my case, not just in terms of happiness, but financially, things are working out. And now this award. I feel it’s because I am doing what I am passionate about.

PT: Speaking of your MacArthur genius award, first, congratulations. What are you planning to do with it?

ABO-SHAEER: I don’t know. I am not going to pay off my house. I am not going to go on a crazy spending spree, but I am also not going to buy pencils and erasers. For me as a public high-school teacher, it has given me the liberty to feel like I can do whatever I want.

PT: What are your thoughts about how to attract more people to become teachers?

ABO-SHAEER: Most people think the problem is that teachers are not paid well, but it’s more than that. When you become a teacher, you start out at the bottom level, no matter how much experience you have in something else.

People who think midcareer about switching to teaching can stomach not getting paid as much, but they cannot stomach having their experience disregarded. This is a huge problem.

The most common question students ask is, When will I use this? That’s not being communicated to them because the people teaching have only learned whatever it is as part of the path to getting their degree. They have never actually used what they are teaching. The system is fundamentally flawed in that it is not encouraging people to come into it. If you look at it, it’s an unhealthy closed system.