For the most part, Hassan Moore has spent his life in the South,
particularly in his hometown of New Orleans, as well as Birmingham, Ala., where
he spent 10 years as a professor at the University of Alabama. However, Moore
recently moved to Virginia, where last month he joined the faculty at Saint John
Paul the Great High School in Dumfries as the new physics and pre-calculus
teacher.
When asked how he and his family ended up in Woodbridge, Moore
said, “My wife and I had a son and we realized that he needed to be more around
family.”
“I believe that being around family will really help my son
develop into a greater person,” Moore said.
When deciding on where they wanted to move, there were two things
on their minds: they wanted to be closer to family and they wanted their son to
go to a school like the one he had been attending in Birmingham, St. Rose
Academy.
“Our son’s kindergarten teacher told us about a school in
Woodbridge that was a sister school to St. Rose,” Moore said. That school
was St. Thomas Aquinas Regional School. Woodbridge seemed to be the perfect
place to move since the Moores were familiar with the area.
“When I was getting my PhD from Howard University, I used to
drive up and down this corridor to visit my wife while she was attending
medical school at Wake Forest in North Carolina,” Moore said. “It was kind of a
hard drive. You do crazy things when you’re in love, I guess.”
Moore said he wasn’t too worried about finding a job in the
area. “Work is work,” he said. “I can
always find something.”
So in July 2017, the family resettled in Woodbridge. During the
2018 school year, Moore taught at Edison High School in Alexandria before joining
the faculty at John Paul the Great this fall. For the majority of his career
Moore has taught college students, but he is not completely unfamiliar with
teaching high schoolers. From 1995 to 1998 he taught at Eleanor McMain
Secondary School in New Orleans.
“Teaching is teaching,” Moore said. “My goal is to bring every
student from a place of darkness to a place of understanding. I feel that
Catholic schools are a great place to learn and I am very happy to be teaching
at a school like John Paul the Great.”