Jaime Escalante: Sensational Teacher____________________________________
Title of Novel
I. Author
A. Lifespan: Ann Byers is a Mother and Grandmother who has worked in ministry with Youth for Christ since 1983.
B. Ann Byers seems to eschew having her own biographical information published beyond the brief information posted on the Youth for Christ website. Unfortunately, her date of birth is not given.
C. Relevant facts: She began serving her community and fellow-man by witnessing in neighborhoods to young people. She has served in numerous positions within the ministry-outreach and currently works with disadvantaged teenagers and their children. Many of the books that she writes address issues faced by these young people that she has faithfully served for nearly three decades.
D. She was born in Virginia, raised in St. Louis, and lived and worked for a period of years on a Navajo reservation in
Arizona. She moved to California in 1969 and began living in Fresno in 1976.
E. Some of Ann’s most important works include books devoted to instructing young people in the best ways to manage
their lives and finances. Books like First Credit Cards and Credit Smarts (Get Smart With Your Money), Sexually Transmitted Diseases: A Hot Issue, Great Resume, Application, and Interview Skills (Work Readiness), First Apartment Smarts (Get Smart With Your Money), Frequently Asked Questions About Puberty (Faq: Teen Life: Set1), and Teens and Pregnancy (A Hot Issue) all relate to her commitment to her fellow men and her decision to serve the youth in her area. The topics of her books reveal an amazing degree of awareness about the topics and a sense of familiarity with the challenges faced by the young people she reaches out to in ministry.
F. It’s almost counter-intuitive to think that Ann Byers only writes about the problems faced by youth because she empathizes with them. The more likely view is that she has either faced these issues herself, has gained a wealth of knowledge about the travails of youth in America by seeing so many of them overcome their unique situational challenges, or both.
Brief plot summary: Jaime Escalante was born on December 31, 1930 and is still active in his chosen vocation. Jaime’s parents were teachers assigned to a rural area with few modern conveniences in southwestern Bolivia. Their teaching assignment was to go to the remote village of Achacachi, which was located at a high elevation in the Andes Mountains. The village where Jaime would be born was established near the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Poverty was the norm for people in this area and the nearest town with decent medical care was four hours away, down winding, bumpy roads in the city of La Paz. So Jaime grew up with the village children and remained in Achacachi until he was nine years old. At that point, his parents separated and his mother moved with her children to La Paz which was overwhelming to young Jaime because of the large number of people living there. He also began attending a formal school where his hyper-active nature caused him to have many visits to the head of the schools for counseling and discipline.
As an adolescent, Jaime began to show unusual promise as a student in the area of mathematics and even exceeded the prowess of his own mother who taught him as a child and helped him with his homework. When he was convinced to take the college entrance exam by his best friend he scored the highest of all those tested in the physics and mathematics categories. So he was approached during his second year at Normal Superior College by a previous math tutor who was now a professor and academic director of many schools in the area to assist in preparing presentations for students and later to teach incoming students physics.
Later he accepted a teaching position at a new school for boys and was soon married to a woman who encouraged him to move to America for the sake of his family and his career. Though he loved teaching young Bolivians, he was compelled to move to the United States by the late 1960’s and was forced to return to college to attain his “American” teaching certification and an under-graduate degree. That degree led him to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
Ultimately, his teaching style and determination to help young people succeed led to him helping many students to pass the Advanced Placement (A.P.) Calculus Exam for entry into college.
Relevant facts
II. In the story Jaime Escalante is forced to overcome every manner of adversity imaginable. He had to learn new languages, once in his native country when he left the small villages in the Andes Mountains and again when he came to America to begin again in a career that he excelled in at home. He later became an entry-level employee at the Burroughs Corporation, an electronics manufacturing plant. He progressed through the ranks until he became a senior tester who worked directly with the company’s engineers.
He was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Scholarship. This was his entrée to a teaching position which he had coveted since he left the small country of Bolivia after teaching ten years in gender-separate schools for boys only. Escalante became a leader at Garfield High and led a mathematics renaissance that led to changes in the class curriculums and changes in him also.
III. Jaime Escalante believed in testing himself as much as he believed in testing his students. He drove himself to physical exhaustion and illness in his relentless quest to accomplish that which was deemed impossible. The challenge drove him to expect more than had ever been demanded of students before and required him to give more than any teacher had ever sacrificed before. His intimacy with his students was palpable and they simultaneously loved him and disdained him because of his obsession with success. He was driven to see them succeed academically.
He began with fourteen students in 1978 but only five took the A.P. exam. He was disappointed when only four passed, so he re-doubled his efforts and began to enlist the assistance of other teachers. In 1979 eight of ten students passed the exam which still didn’t satisfy Jaime Escalante. The next group of students, the following year, signed a contract and their parents were encouraged to support their children in this great endeavor. In 1980 fourteen of fifteen students passed the A.P. Calculus Exam and the next year Jaime was elected to chair the math department at Garfield High.
IV. The primary characters in the story are Jaime Escalante, the people that taught him, and the people he taught. His grandfather taught him to read and count in his native Bolivia when he was just a boy. He was a retired teacher and discovered that Jaime loved riddles, puzzles, and creative games. Umberto Bilbao was one of Escalante’s elementary school teachers and discovered that Jaime loved mathematics, and his mother, Sara Escalante, taught him fractions by slicing up pieces of fruit into various quantities representing fractional equivalents. Sara also taught Jaime about “ganas” or desire. In the army he learned to barter and negotiate for food and other items that he needed.
Fabiola Tapia taught him to be a better husband than his father was. She also taught him to expand his horizons and goals such that he traveled to America to create a new future he might never have had otherwise. She was not only his wife but a teacher herself. Later he developed his life-philosophy which centered around four guiding principles:
1. Determination – his ganas led him to long above all else to become a teacher;
2. Discipline – his lessons and studies were always a priority in his life which gave him organization;
3. Hard Work – he always held at least three jobs simultaneously, and had four at one point;
4. Success – eventually he had a beautiful family, a home that he loved, and the career he desired.
Later his brother, Sam Tapia, taught him the value of transportation so he purchased a new Volkswagon. He also taught Escalante to think of travel in terms of time required to make the journey, rather than distance. This became very important in a mega-city like Los Angeles. He went to the YMCA and junior college to learn English and learned from his ambitionless co-worker at Van de Kamp’s Coffee Shop to never settle for mediocrity. Finally, Escalante learned that American college professors care very little for their students when he was told to drop a class because he was unlikely to pass it due to his accent.
Other important characters include the employees and management at Burroughs Corporation, the instructors at the University of Southern California, the professor from California State University who pointed him to the National Science Foundation scholarship, and his students at Garfield High School
B. The characters in the story all impact Escalante’s perception of his surroundings or his perception of himself. His wife knew he would never leave Bolivia without prodding because of his sense of duty. She also correctly surmised that he would prefer to remain a busboy making near minimum wage rather than work for Burroughs unless it appealed to him as a means to shorten the distance to his teaching career. She wanted him to make more money and he did, so they both got a return-on-investment. The professor that required him to drop the class drove him to become a teacher that never gave up on his students, no matter the cost to him personally. The students learned to expand their goals and be led by ganas to strive for the so-called impossible. They become more than they were expected to be because he believed in them.
C. Development: The author does spend some time developing the relationships between Escalante and his mother as well as the relationships with his wife and students. Jaime’s mother was poverty-stricken despite her status as a teaching-professional. Her level of pay was illustrated by the author who wrote “Sara was not well paid. There were days when she had very little—once only one slice of bread—to divide among her two daughters and three sons”.
Jaime was a creative teacher and his techniques both amused and intrigued his soon to be wife. The author writes “She was studying to become a teacher, and she was intrigued with the unusual ways Jaime figured out his mathematics problems. One of her friends was struggling in math, and she asked Jaime to show them his special techniques.” “You have a funny way of doing things,” she smiled.
Escalante was also very specific in his execution as a teacher. The author writes “Everything about him—his exaggerated facial expressions, his classroom theatrics, his sarcastic barbs—everything was calculated to push his students to the peak of performance”. “Even Escalante’s clothes figured in his teaching methodology.”
IV. Setting
A. The story takes place from his birth in 1930 to modern day Los Angeles where he began the Calculus – intensive teaching methodology to his final teaching assignment at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, California in 1991.
B. Jaime Escalante traveled half way around the world to share his remarkable gift in America. One wonders how he might have impacted Bolivia if he had remained there.
C. This story could have taken place at different times from a historical perspective. Northern teachers with less narrow views of the world might have had a profound effect on the children of the deep-south during the pre-Civil War era had they been given entre to southern students willing to hear dissenting viewpoints on slavery. A student from an all-black school might have been shocked to suddenly attend a segregated school on the West Coast during the late 1950’s. Teachers have profound effects when they speak things that stimulate students in any era.
V. Conflict: Escalante’s main problem at the heart of the story is getting students to believe in him and themselves. As a child who was constantly scolded in Bolivian public schools he must have reveled in the freedom given to teachers in this country and the access to both students and their parents given to those same educators.
VI. Resolution: The problem is solved with determination, discipline, hard-work, and success. Escalante created the ganas or desire to accomplish the most difficult of task against opposition from faculty and students by having the guts to try something different.
VII. Vocabulary
A. Discipline
1. Definition: training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character; control gained by enforcing obedience or order; orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior; self-control; a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity.
2. “The discipline Escalante brought to his work resulted in suggestions and innovations that saved Burroughs a considerable amount of money.” P. 61
B. Determination
1. Definition: the act of deciding definitely and firmly, also; the result of such an act or decision; firm or fixed intention to achieve a desired end; a fixing or finding of the position, magnitude, value, or character of something; the definition of a concept in logic by its essential constituents:
2. “Escalante could not afford to wait until he mastered the language before getting a job.” “His brother-in-law had not been able to find work for him, so he set out himself, armed with little English, but a lot of determination.” P. 48
C. Hard work
1. Definition: activity in which one exerts maximum strength, energy, or faculties to do or perform something; sustained, maximum physical or mental effort to overcome an obstacle and achieve an objective or result; a specific, difficult task, duty, function, or assignment often being a part or phase of some larger activity.
2. “He lectured on the importance of hard work.” “An employer will not want to hear your problems,” he predicted. “An employer would care only how hard they were willing to work.” P. 77
D. Success
1. Definition: the degree or measure of accomplishment; favorable or desired outcome; the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.
2. “An eighty percent success rate was wonderful, especially for the first time anyone passed an A.P. calculus test in the school’s history and considering all the hurdles the class had to face.” “But Escalante was not satisfied.” “He was determined to include more students the following year.” P.83
VIII. Personal criticism and recommendation
A. Criticism; I have no criticism of the book because it reflects a real person with extraordinary vision and leadership. Jaime Escalante did what no one before him had done; he brought real, constructive change to Garfield High School and the change was pervasive. I’m quite sure that many of the teachers cringed when he was forced to leave for another school because they realized that they might be ushering in another season of academic futility. Some people may not have cared who got the credit, and the students certainly were less likely to achieve their previous levels of success in the A.P calculus exam without Escalante’s assistance and inspiration.
The author used vivid imagery to create the scenes from Escalante’s life in the book. Her vivid depiction of him attaching wheels to a board as a child and later collecting what his mother referred to as junk evoked some of my own childhood memories. I to believed that the “junk” my mother viewed was treasure to be protected at all cost. The author also used photographs effectively to document the periods as art forms to showcase a different time and place that I could not envision without seeing certain elements displayed like Escalante’s clothing and military uniforms.
In the section on playing defense, Escalante’s quote is visceral as the author tells us that he “explodes in anger”. “You’re chasing a black cat in a dark room,’ he spat as he stormed out fully suffices a near-profane-tirade from this sensitive, scholarly gentleman whom we’ve seen somber, playful, and merely offended previously.
B. Recommendation: I would recommend the book and the movie though I haven’t seen the movie lately. Edward James Olmos does a more than credible job of creating the personage of Escalante without turning him into a caricature and the ensemble cast help to make the movie reflect the values spoken of in the biography.
You get a sense of the overwhelming dread Escalante must have felt when he saw the miserable plight of the students and remembered his mother trying to feed five of her children with one piece of bread. That memory would make anyone work three or four jobs rather than repeat that experience.
Title of Novel
I. Author
A. Lifespan: Ann Byers is a Mother and Grandmother who has worked in ministry with Youth for Christ since 1983.
B. Ann Byers seems to eschew having her own biographical information published beyond the brief information posted on the Youth for Christ website. Unfortunately, her date of birth is not given.
C. Relevant facts: She began serving her community and fellow-man by witnessing in neighborhoods to young people. She has served in numerous positions within the ministry-outreach and currently works with disadvantaged teenagers and their children. Many of the books that she writes address issues faced by these young people that she has faithfully served for nearly three decades.
D. She was born in Virginia, raised in St. Louis, and lived and worked for a period of years on a Navajo reservation in
Arizona. She moved to California in 1969 and began living in Fresno in 1976.
E. Some of Ann’s most important works include books devoted to instructing young people in the best ways to manage
their lives and finances. Books like First Credit Cards and Credit Smarts (Get Smart With Your Money), Sexually Transmitted Diseases: A Hot Issue, Great Resume, Application, and Interview Skills (Work Readiness), First Apartment Smarts (Get Smart With Your Money), Frequently Asked Questions About Puberty (Faq: Teen Life: Set1), and Teens and Pregnancy (A Hot Issue) all relate to her commitment to her fellow men and her decision to serve the youth in her area. The topics of her books reveal an amazing degree of awareness about the topics and a sense of familiarity with the challenges faced by the young people she reaches out to in ministry.
F. It’s almost counter-intuitive to think that Ann Byers only writes about the problems faced by youth because she empathizes with them. The more likely view is that she has either faced these issues herself, has gained a wealth of knowledge about the travails of youth in America by seeing so many of them overcome their unique situational challenges, or both.
Brief plot summary: Jaime Escalante was born on December 31, 1930 and is still active in his chosen vocation. Jaime’s parents were teachers assigned to a rural area with few modern conveniences in southwestern Bolivia. Their teaching assignment was to go to the remote village of Achacachi, which was located at a high elevation in the Andes Mountains. The village where Jaime would be born was established near the shores of Lake Titicaca.
Poverty was the norm for people in this area and the nearest town with decent medical care was four hours away, down winding, bumpy roads in the city of La Paz. So Jaime grew up with the village children and remained in Achacachi until he was nine years old. At that point, his parents separated and his mother moved with her children to La Paz which was overwhelming to young Jaime because of the large number of people living there. He also began attending a formal school where his hyper-active nature caused him to have many visits to the head of the schools for counseling and discipline.
As an adolescent, Jaime began to show unusual promise as a student in the area of mathematics and even exceeded the prowess of his own mother who taught him as a child and helped him with his homework. When he was convinced to take the college entrance exam by his best friend he scored the highest of all those tested in the physics and mathematics categories. So he was approached during his second year at Normal Superior College by a previous math tutor who was now a professor and academic director of many schools in the area to assist in preparing presentations for students and later to teach incoming students physics.
Later he accepted a teaching position at a new school for boys and was soon married to a woman who encouraged him to move to America for the sake of his family and his career. Though he loved teaching young Bolivians, he was compelled to move to the United States by the late 1960’s and was forced to return to college to attain his “American” teaching certification and an under-graduate degree. That degree led him to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.
Ultimately, his teaching style and determination to help young people succeed led to him helping many students to pass the Advanced Placement (A.P.) Calculus Exam for entry into college.
Relevant facts
II. In the story Jaime Escalante is forced to overcome every manner of adversity imaginable. He had to learn new languages, once in his native country when he left the small villages in the Andes Mountains and again when he came to America to begin again in a career that he excelled in at home. He later became an entry-level employee at the Burroughs Corporation, an electronics manufacturing plant. He progressed through the ranks until he became a senior tester who worked directly with the company’s engineers.
He was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Scholarship. This was his entrée to a teaching position which he had coveted since he left the small country of Bolivia after teaching ten years in gender-separate schools for boys only. Escalante became a leader at Garfield High and led a mathematics renaissance that led to changes in the class curriculums and changes in him also.
III. Jaime Escalante believed in testing himself as much as he believed in testing his students. He drove himself to physical exhaustion and illness in his relentless quest to accomplish that which was deemed impossible. The challenge drove him to expect more than had ever been demanded of students before and required him to give more than any teacher had ever sacrificed before. His intimacy with his students was palpable and they simultaneously loved him and disdained him because of his obsession with success. He was driven to see them succeed academically.
He began with fourteen students in 1978 but only five took the A.P. exam. He was disappointed when only four passed, so he re-doubled his efforts and began to enlist the assistance of other teachers. In 1979 eight of ten students passed the exam which still didn’t satisfy Jaime Escalante. The next group of students, the following year, signed a contract and their parents were encouraged to support their children in this great endeavor. In 1980 fourteen of fifteen students passed the A.P. Calculus Exam and the next year Jaime was elected to chair the math department at Garfield High.
IV. The primary characters in the story are Jaime Escalante, the people that taught him, and the people he taught. His grandfather taught him to read and count in his native Bolivia when he was just a boy. He was a retired teacher and discovered that Jaime loved riddles, puzzles, and creative games. Umberto Bilbao was one of Escalante’s elementary school teachers and discovered that Jaime loved mathematics, and his mother, Sara Escalante, taught him fractions by slicing up pieces of fruit into various quantities representing fractional equivalents. Sara also taught Jaime about “ganas” or desire. In the army he learned to barter and negotiate for food and other items that he needed.
Fabiola Tapia taught him to be a better husband than his father was. She also taught him to expand his horizons and goals such that he traveled to America to create a new future he might never have had otherwise. She was not only his wife but a teacher herself. Later he developed his life-philosophy which centered around four guiding principles:
1. Determination – his ganas led him to long above all else to become a teacher;
2. Discipline – his lessons and studies were always a priority in his life which gave him organization;
3. Hard Work – he always held at least three jobs simultaneously, and had four at one point;
4. Success – eventually he had a beautiful family, a home that he loved, and the career he desired.
Later his brother, Sam Tapia, taught him the value of transportation so he purchased a new Volkswagon. He also taught Escalante to think of travel in terms of time required to make the journey, rather than distance. This became very important in a mega-city like Los Angeles. He went to the YMCA and junior college to learn English and learned from his ambitionless co-worker at Van de Kamp’s Coffee Shop to never settle for mediocrity. Finally, Escalante learned that American college professors care very little for their students when he was told to drop a class because he was unlikely to pass it due to his accent.
Other important characters include the employees and management at Burroughs Corporation, the instructors at the University of Southern California, the professor from California State University who pointed him to the National Science Foundation scholarship, and his students at Garfield High School
B. The characters in the story all impact Escalante’s perception of his surroundings or his perception of himself. His wife knew he would never leave Bolivia without prodding because of his sense of duty. She also correctly surmised that he would prefer to remain a busboy making near minimum wage rather than work for Burroughs unless it appealed to him as a means to shorten the distance to his teaching career. She wanted him to make more money and he did, so they both got a return-on-investment. The professor that required him to drop the class drove him to become a teacher that never gave up on his students, no matter the cost to him personally. The students learned to expand their goals and be led by ganas to strive for the so-called impossible. They become more than they were expected to be because he believed in them.
C. Development: The author does spend some time developing the relationships between Escalante and his mother as well as the relationships with his wife and students. Jaime’s mother was poverty-stricken despite her status as a teaching-professional. Her level of pay was illustrated by the author who wrote “Sara was not well paid. There were days when she had very little—once only one slice of bread—to divide among her two daughters and three sons”.
Jaime was a creative teacher and his techniques both amused and intrigued his soon to be wife. The author writes “She was studying to become a teacher, and she was intrigued with the unusual ways Jaime figured out his mathematics problems. One of her friends was struggling in math, and she asked Jaime to show them his special techniques.” “You have a funny way of doing things,” she smiled.
Escalante was also very specific in his execution as a teacher. The author writes “Everything about him—his exaggerated facial expressions, his classroom theatrics, his sarcastic barbs—everything was calculated to push his students to the peak of performance”. “Even Escalante’s clothes figured in his teaching methodology.”
IV. Setting
A. The story takes place from his birth in 1930 to modern day Los Angeles where he began the Calculus – intensive teaching methodology to his final teaching assignment at Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, California in 1991.
B. Jaime Escalante traveled half way around the world to share his remarkable gift in America. One wonders how he might have impacted Bolivia if he had remained there.
C. This story could have taken place at different times from a historical perspective. Northern teachers with less narrow views of the world might have had a profound effect on the children of the deep-south during the pre-Civil War era had they been given entre to southern students willing to hear dissenting viewpoints on slavery. A student from an all-black school might have been shocked to suddenly attend a segregated school on the West Coast during the late 1950’s. Teachers have profound effects when they speak things that stimulate students in any era.
V. Conflict: Escalante’s main problem at the heart of the story is getting students to believe in him and themselves. As a child who was constantly scolded in Bolivian public schools he must have reveled in the freedom given to teachers in this country and the access to both students and their parents given to those same educators.
VI. Resolution: The problem is solved with determination, discipline, hard-work, and success. Escalante created the ganas or desire to accomplish the most difficult of task against opposition from faculty and students by having the guts to try something different.
VII. Vocabulary
A. Discipline
1. Definition: training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character; control gained by enforcing obedience or order; orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior; self-control; a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity.
2. “The discipline Escalante brought to his work resulted in suggestions and innovations that saved Burroughs a considerable amount of money.” P. 61
B. Determination
1. Definition: the act of deciding definitely and firmly, also; the result of such an act or decision; firm or fixed intention to achieve a desired end; a fixing or finding of the position, magnitude, value, or character of something; the definition of a concept in logic by its essential constituents:
2. “Escalante could not afford to wait until he mastered the language before getting a job.” “His brother-in-law had not been able to find work for him, so he set out himself, armed with little English, but a lot of determination.” P. 48
C. Hard work
1. Definition: activity in which one exerts maximum strength, energy, or faculties to do or perform something; sustained, maximum physical or mental effort to overcome an obstacle and achieve an objective or result; a specific, difficult task, duty, function, or assignment often being a part or phase of some larger activity.
2. “He lectured on the importance of hard work.” “An employer will not want to hear your problems,” he predicted. “An employer would care only how hard they were willing to work.” P. 77
D. Success
1. Definition: the degree or measure of accomplishment; favorable or desired outcome; the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.
2. “An eighty percent success rate was wonderful, especially for the first time anyone passed an A.P. calculus test in the school’s history and considering all the hurdles the class had to face.” “But Escalante was not satisfied.” “He was determined to include more students the following year.” P.83
VIII. Personal criticism and recommendation
A. Criticism; I have no criticism of the book because it reflects a real person with extraordinary vision and leadership. Jaime Escalante did what no one before him had done; he brought real, constructive change to Garfield High School and the change was pervasive. I’m quite sure that many of the teachers cringed when he was forced to leave for another school because they realized that they might be ushering in another season of academic futility. Some people may not have cared who got the credit, and the students certainly were less likely to achieve their previous levels of success in the A.P calculus exam without Escalante’s assistance and inspiration.
The author used vivid imagery to create the scenes from Escalante’s life in the book. Her vivid depiction of him attaching wheels to a board as a child and later collecting what his mother referred to as junk evoked some of my own childhood memories. I to believed that the “junk” my mother viewed was treasure to be protected at all cost. The author also used photographs effectively to document the periods as art forms to showcase a different time and place that I could not envision without seeing certain elements displayed like Escalante’s clothing and military uniforms.
In the section on playing defense, Escalante’s quote is visceral as the author tells us that he “explodes in anger”. “You’re chasing a black cat in a dark room,’ he spat as he stormed out fully suffices a near-profane-tirade from this sensitive, scholarly gentleman whom we’ve seen somber, playful, and merely offended previously.
B. Recommendation: I would recommend the book and the movie though I haven’t seen the movie lately. Edward James Olmos does a more than credible job of creating the personage of Escalante without turning him into a caricature and the ensemble cast help to make the movie reflect the values spoken of in the biography.
You get a sense of the overwhelming dread Escalante must have felt when he saw the miserable plight of the students and remembered his mother trying to feed five of her children with one piece of bread. That memory would make anyone work three or four jobs rather than repeat that experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment