Abraham “Abe” Joshua is eternally dancing and bopping in the hallways of Mission Preparatory School in San Francisco.
You’ll see that spirit captured in the formal mosaic created in his honor by students at the charter school in the eclectic city’s vibrant Mission district.
It’s most definitely present in the painting another Mission Prep kid did on his own, simply titled, “Mr. Joshua in Motion.”
And the first thing you’ll see upon entering his science classroom is a giant sketch of the teacher in permanent marker on whiteboard up front, surrounded by inscriptions from students and colleagues alike.
Joshua, 23, a Morgantown native who was teaching there while considering a go at medical school, died March 2 after being hit a by a truck as he rode his scooter to class.
“To know Mr. Joshua was to be surrounded by positive energy and a brilliant mind,” said Cynthia Jerez, the school’s executive director. She was only being slightly formal.
“‘Abe,’ as he was known to me, was the epitome of the cool, new teacher,” she said of Joshua, who joined the faculty last August.
When he wasn’t teaching science, the director said, he was filling in as needed, especially over January, when omicron showed up to put some of his colleagues out for several days at a time.
Joshua, she said, was everywhere and anywhere — and all at once — filling in for other teachers, while, more often than not, giving up his planning periods to mentor students.
Varsity and JV practices and games? Of course, Mr. Joshua was going to be there, and he wasn’t going to be shy about cheering his encouragement either.
It was the classroom where his star shone most brightly, Jerez said.
He was known to revise lesson plans on the spot, if he caught furrowed brows and eyes glazing over.
Give the teacher a carton of dry ice for a learning activity, or a prism and an afternoon ray of that golden California sunlight, and you had the biggest kid in the classroom — whooping like a kid on Christmas morning who finally got that beagle puppy he couldn’t stop talking about.
Mission Prep, which houses students in kindergarten through eighth grade, is known for its academic rigor, and the new guy locked right in.
Journeys, in present tense
Dr. Eyassu Hailemichael and Elizabeth Kidane, his parents, settled in Morgantown after their careers brought them to Texas and Washington, D.C., following an arduous trek.
The couple escaped the Eritean-Ethiopian War in 1998, the same year Abe was born.
Hailemichael is a radiologist and Kidane is a pharmacist.
Young Abraham, who was 10 when the family moved here, assimilated quickly — as Morgantown, being a college town, is a pocket of diversity in a state not always known for it.
At Morgantown High, he aced his Advanced Placement classes and sang in the show choir. He was a big a presence in the MHS hallway as he would go on to be at Mission Prep’s.
He happily looked after his little brother, Samson, during times when his parents were snowed under with work.
His grades got him an Ivy League education at Princeton, which included a sojourn to China as an undergraduate, where it didn’t take him long to make friends and carry on conversations in Mandarin, even if he did have to carefully translate in his head as he did so.
Joshua went to San Francisco as an educator in the Teach for America program. He brought the music with him: The singing and dancing, which worked great for the shy kids. He loved his apartment in Japantown.
Mission Preparatory, meanwhile, has also set up a GoFundMe account for a scholarship in the teacher’s honor. Visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/Abraham-Eyassu-Joshua-Legacy-Scholarship for more information and to contribute.
The funeral was last week in Maryland, but his father still puts him in present tense, because, well, he has to.
“My son is always on the giving end of things,” said Dr. Hailemichael, who toured Mission Prep and met teachers and students who worked with his son.
“He’s always helping people. He’s always making a difference. That’s how he is.”
Getting it in writing
Which was evident, on that whiteboard, in permanent marker, in that classroom that will always be Mr. Joshua’s.
Some were in yearbook script and others were long and heartfelt.
Still more were peppered with inside jokes from the classroom presided over by that popular kid from West Virginia, a son of refugees and the Ivy League who transformed himself into both an educator, and a citizen of the world.
One student, who only signed his initials, “C.G.,” wrote just enough: “Thank you for being our teacher.”
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