For those of you who have never seen Stand and Deliver, you really ought to. Jaime Escalante took a job to teach math in an Los Angeles high school that was failing state standards back in the early 80s. He believed the kids would rise to the expectations of their teachers an offered a calculus class for students so they could take the AP exam. I highly reccomend this film to anyone who hasn't watched it. A couple of weeks ago I watched it while I was doing my homework and found myself welling up with tears at the end, just like every other time (except the time I watched it my Freshman year in Spanish class. No place for tears there).
This past week Jaime Escalante died as a result of bladder cancer that he had been fighting for some time now. We have lost a great teacher, but his legacy will continue as long as there are teachers out there who stretch the potential of their students and help them realize that they have the ganas to succeed. I doubt I'll end up in a High school comparable to that of Escalante's, and because I don't teach a subject matter that anyone cares about taking a standardized test for, I won't ever be praised for raising test scores. But the impact Mr. Escalante made on his students wasn't just that they got a couple of college credits. He changed the entire reason his students were there at school. Every year more and more kids took calculus from him and more and more kids passed the AP exam. He changed the culture of the school into one where students saw what they could become and had the ganas to be more than people on the outside believed they could be.
3 comments:
I should see this. For sure.
Yes, and not only are his student better, we are all (or can all be) better because he set the standard and the example.
He paid the price with the "sweathogs" and then was able to move to Sacramento, have a special classroom built for him, and choose which students he wanted to have. It's almost like he had to earn the right to have a charter school. It's amazes me just how many educators still haven't learned from him.
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