Karim Azeb

Karim Azeb was born in Egypt and grew up in Brooklyn, NY as an avid sports fan. He began teaching lower level students after graduating from UMass Amherst, and is now a social studies teacher at the high school. This summer Azeb got married and spent his honeymoon in Turks and Caicos.

What got you into teaching?

Oh man, so actually I never wanted to be a teacher. In college I was pre-law. I took the LSAT my senior or junior year of college, did really well, but for some reason when I got closer to graduation, I’m like I don’t really want to go to law school. So I ended up doing City Year Boston, which is a tutoring program in the inner city. I landed at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School in Dorchester.

What eventually brought you to Brookline High School?

One of my coworkers at Prospect Hill Academy used to teach at Brookline, and he brought me to a history conference where I met Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator Gary Shiffman. I also met John Bassett, who was a teacher here at the time. I enjoyed how they taught adults to teach history, and in the back of my mind, I was like this is a dude I could work for. Then the opportunity arose last year to apply for the job at Brookline, and he hired me right after, and I said yes!

Where did you grow up and go to high school?

I was born in Egypt, but I moved to the United States when I was seven, so I very much consider myself an American. I spent most of my formative years in Brooklyn. When we first came to the US, we were in Buffalo.

What got you into history at the end of the day?

I’ve always been a political fanatic. But mainly it was being an immigrant, especially an Egyptian, brown skinned, Muslim immigrant. We moved to Brooklyn, but then 9/11 happened. Kids weren’t nice to us when we first got there, and weren’t nice to us afterward. They said we were terrorists or the n-word or “these brown foreign pieces of sh*t,” etc. You’d go to school and you’d have these ten year old kids say “my mommy said you were the reason the towers blew up”, “my mommy said to stay away from you because your people are bad,” and none of these people even knew what Islam was. Even in college playing soccer, there are still kids on the soccer field calling me terrorists and stuff like that. I spent a lot of time reading up on my history and then transitioning to the history of black people in the United States and then falling in love with Malcolm X. So it was really the experience of 9/11 in New York City and being public enemy number one, and trying to survive that.

Who is your role model? Who did you look up to maybe growing up or now?

Obviously my mom. She was a single mother in the most important years of a young boy’s life. Outside of my mom, Malcolm X. I read and memorized everything of his after the age of twelve.