Reply #27: Jaime Escalante's Legacy: Teaching Hope

[Judi Lynn]

Jaime Escalante's Legacy: Teaching Hope
by Claudio Sanchez
March 31, 2010

For 20 years, Jaime Escalante taught calculus and advanced math at Garfield High School in one of East Los Angeles' most notorious barrios, a place where poor, hardened street kids were not supposed to master mathematics, and certainly not algebra, trigonometry, calculus.

But Escalante believed that a teacher should never, ever let a student give up.

"You have to love the subject you teach and you have to love the kids and make them see that they have a chance, opportunity in this country to become whatever they want to," he told NPR several years ago.

The Bolivian-born teacher, who inspired the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, died Tuesday at 79 after a long battle with cancer. Escalante may not have become a household name after Hollywood captured his remarkable story, but he possessed an enduring gift: He could inspire, cajole, even taunt young, troubled kids to see themselves not as they were but as they could be.

To make it, Escalante often said, you need ganas, Spanish for desire and drive. Ganas was Escalantes' battle cry, not just in motivating his students, but every time he chided apathetic administrators and jaded teachers. Stand and Deliver captures the tension perfectly in a scene when Escalante, played by Edward James Olmos, announces he wants to teach calculus and his colleagues think it's a joke.