Hindsight
Joined: 02 Feb 2009
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 Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2010 7:11 pm Post subject: Jaime Escalante, of "Stand and Deliver," has died |
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Jaime Escalante dies at 79; math teacher who challenged East L.A. students to 'Stand and Deliver'
He became America's most famous teacher after a 1988 movie portrayed his success at mentoring working-class pupils at Garfield High to pass a rigorous national calculus exam. He died of cancer.
By Elaine Woo
7:08 PM PDT, March 30, 2010
Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.
The subject of the 1988 film "Stand and Deliver," Escalante died at his son's home in Roseville, Calif., said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed the teacher in the film. Escalante had bladder cancer.
"Jaime didn't just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives," Olmos said earlier this month when he organized an appeal for funds to help pay Escalante's mounting medical bills. |
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jaime-escalante31-2010mar31,0,4111731,full.story
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LOS ANGELES -- Garfield High School, a drab block of concrete in the middle of a low-income, Hispanic neighborhood in East Los Angeles, has been known for high absenteeism and youth gangs, but never for higher mathematics. Perhaps that is what fooled the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J.
In the May 19 national advanced placement calculus test, which is so difficult that only 2 percent of graduating high school seniors ever attempt it, a startling total of 18 Garfield students passed. Many had similar correct answers and seven made the top score of five, what one Garfield teacher compared with "walking on water."
Sensitive to the slightest hint of invalid scores, the service, which composes the Scholastic Aptitude Test and other national examinations, demanded a retest for 14 of the students, but the results were the same. It had stumbled across, not a cabal of cheaters, but the students of Jaime Escalante, 51, a Bolivian immigrant who has performed a miracle in a tough, big-city school.
In the process, he also has shown what a rigidly organized classroom routine and a deep devotion to teaching might do to solve what is becoming a national crisis. |
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/30/AR2010033003814.html
Jaime Escalante was a great teacher, obviously. He didn't spoon feed his students; he made them work and had high expectations for them. It was they who delivered. |
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