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Stand and Deliver Teacher Jaime Escalante Dies
DesScorp writes "Jaime Escalante, the math teacher portrayed in the hit '80s movie Stand and Deliver, has died of cancer at age 79. Escalante is legendary for creating the advanced math 'pipeline' program at Garfield High in East Los Angeles in the '70s and '80s, an area populated mostly by poorer Hispanic families. Escalante's students eventually outpaced even richer schools in advanced placement tests for calculus. Escalante refused to accept excuses from his students or community about why they couldn't succeed, and demanded a standard of excellence from them, defying the notion that poor Hispanic kids just weren't capable of advanced work. While Escalante became a celebrity because of the hit movie about his efforts, jealousy from other teachers ... as well as red tape from teacher's unions and the public school bureaucracy, resulted in Escalante and his hand-picked teachers leaving Garfield. Since his departure, Garfield has never replicated Escalante's success with math students, and Reason Magazine reported on the shameful way in which others tore down what Escalante and his teachers worked so hard to build."
Truly an American icon. Or at least a Mexican one.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'm going to cry. Really.
I had the blessing to meet Mr. Escalante just a few months ago, before he was diagnosed with cancer. What a wonderful, wonderful man.
They should name schools after people like him.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
To hell with those people who won't voluntarily better themselves.
If you don't continually strive to do better on your own, then that's your problem and you should be shunned by everyone who can take a little bit of initiative and learn things on their own.
Like this incident shows, the issue in this case, and many others, isn't about the people being stupid. It's about them just not caring enough about themselves to improve their situation.
He was played in a movie by the guy from Blade Runner *and* Battlestar Galactica.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's no wonder he got lots of resistance against his peers, administration and teachers union. Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
"I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers." - John D. Rockefeller
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
This is a shining example of how politics are ruining America's youth.
There is a war going on for your mind.
East Los Angeles, not New York, was the real Jaime-town.
Of course they got rid of him! How dare the poorer class schools be able to progress!
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
One of the most powerful of human emotions, especially amongst the teaching profession...
NOOOOOOOO NOT JAIME!!!!11ELEVEN!!!
wait, what'd he do again?
"Hey, man. What's Cal-coo-lus?"
After reading the article, I can only be outraged by Maria Elena Tostado, the administrator who let political expediency outweigh academic legitimacy.I guess the lesson, we should learn from this is that evil wins. I can think of dozens of examples from my own life where the dogs have won.
The only lesson, that I can learn from this affair, is that we need more guns in schools.
-Regards.
...the inner city students are still more likely to end up in jail and drop out of high school. Plus I don't trust the ways tests are administered to these sorts of students. It's easy to fudge the scores for better funding, etc.
... that William Adama would rally the Galactica staff and Viper pilots with a rousing cry of, "Stand and Deliver!"
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""
Illich:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
John Holt:
http://www.holtgws.com/
Collections of links by me on this:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It would be hard to overstate the impact Escalante has made on the education reform movement in the U.S. He and Rafe Esquith were the first to prove very publicly and definitively that demography is not destiny and that inner-city kids, with great teaching and high expectations, could achieve at high levels.
At his peak, Escalante had 187 students at one time sitting for the Calculus AP exam — and his students accounted for ONE-THIRD of all Mexican-Americans passing the exam in the country.
I don't quite understand why you're being modded troll when critics of the system from both right and left agree that public schools aren't so much focused on education as they are on producing "useful people"... to employers, government, etc. As much as conservative groups support things like charter schools, minority families... traditionally loyal Democratic voters... support them even more, because despite ever increasing dollars on public schools, the public system isn't getting it done with their kids. Washington D.C. schools spend more per pupil than just about anywhere else, and yet have among the worst scores and graduation rates.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
deepending on where one is, it looks just like that, except on a much grander scale.
the manufactured 'weather' appears to be making things at least worse.
just like military 'school', everybody must be punished for the misdeeds of a few.
fortunately for many, it has been said that the creators love the least of us the most, it's an upside down kingdumb, the meek shall.. etc..., stuff like that. makes one think there'll be plenty of 'stuff' left after the big flash. see you there?
It would be a worth while effort to increase teacher pay and encourage more great teachers instead of spending it all on the same books every couple of years and other crap. Kids actually learn from great Teachers.
Wassapenin? Dónde está la biblioteca?
Why would anyone be surprised? Look at the racial makeup of California. Except for a few pockets of whites in Northern California, the state is almost overrun with Blacks and Mexicans.
While I know the poster was trolling, his comments are in stark contrast to Escalante's own work: anyone, regardless of skin color or income, can better themselves if they're willing to work hard enough and dedicate themselves in the long run. Escalante proved it, and he proved it with student AP calculus scores eventually outpacing even the very rich schools like Beverly Hills. It's shameful that some of his own fellow teachers thought he was being "cruel" to Hispanic kids by expecting excellence, and that he was risking their "self-esteem". Well, those teachers chased him off, and now I wonder how high the esteem of those students is now that they're no longer reaching the academic heights that Escalante took them to?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Jaime died just the once. Not habitually.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
subsidizing those who already send their children to parochial schools.
The parents of the kids in parochial school pay twice: once for their own kids' tuition, once again for their neighbors' kids via the school and property taxes. The typical voucher plan doesn't "force a taxpayer to pay for religious education," it allows a taxpayer to pay for what he actually uses.
Meanwhile, if all the kids who were in parochial school were to leave parochial school and enter the public system (into which their parents had already paid their share) that public system would collapse. Even with the "extra money" coming in from the parents of the kids who are not educated publicly, the public system is on the verge of financial, educational, and architectural collapse. You should thank God (erm, sorry) every day that the "religious kids" are not in the public system; the public system couldn't handle it.
You, uh, might want to reread my post. Don't just stop when you begin to get angry at what you think I'm saying. Read the last paragraph.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There is another connection between Garfield High and math. The eponymous president, James A. Garfield, discovered a novel proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I believe Olmos and Escalante were both Americans. You can be American and still be Hispanic. You can only be both American and Mexican if you have dual citizenship.
You can only be a citizen of the United States of America and a Mexican citizen if you have dual citizenship. Plenty of people of "Mexican" decent are US citizens, and some (very few) vice-versa. They are all "Americans".
I personally know a man who has run a private school for 40+ years. Where he lives, there used to be a voucher program. Many private schools went through the hoops to restructure to qualify. In then end, the schools that accepted the vouchers had to close.
Why? Well, eventually the voucher program was brought to court. The schools had grown dependent on the voucher program. The families had grown dependent. When the money was gone, they all had to shut down. Except for the schools which had avoided the voucher program.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in:
* only doing what someone in authority tells you to do;
* only socializing with people of a similar age, similar mental abilities, and similar social class;
* doing stuff no matter how stupid or pointless you thought it was just because some authority told you to do it or else;
* had more chances to think up your own things to do with people you picked;
* had more chances to work with both your hands and brain;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1
* and so on.
See New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
See also his:
"State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"""
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
"""
And that last is part of what happened to Jaime Escalante. While he may not have understood the bigger picture, he deviated from the lessons, and was ultimately replaced, whatever the results.
As Gatto says at the end there:
"""
A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So wait, it was this guy that turned out to be the final one? I thought that show was over.
There are certainly other factors beyond merely the style of teaching. Schools that have adopted Jamie Oliver's suggested food program have shown test scores in exams and intelligence tests rise whilst illness levels fall. However, given that all other things remained essentially constant, Escalante certainly demonstrated the impact of teaching methods. If you add in effective streaming, sane textbooks and other refinements, one wonders just how far education could go. (If you go by the change in identified child prodigies as a fraction of world population, the number is about a third what it was in the 1700s. Given how much more we know about child psychology, how much more available textbooks are and how much better our ability to disseminate information on talented people is, I'd have expected the fraction of identified geniuses to have risen. Given that our knowledge of nutrition and its impact on the development of the brain has also improved, I'd have expected the level of talent as an absolute to have also risen.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities.
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
We should also implement a basic income (social security and medicare for all, without age limits or a means test) for everyone as a human right, while we are at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There's a good point here that this is not just a right-vs.-left problem. You might want to look into Diane Ravitch's opinions to see how that's going. (Here's the first link I could Google, there's more commentary around.)
In a nutshell, Ravitch was a big supporter of the new way forward for schools during the Bush administration. She backed the testing for No Child Left Behind, she stumped for charter schools and voucher systems - y'know, right-wing ideas. Over the past few years, she's looked at the data, and she's since changed her mind dramatically. She's cited research that charter schools aren't improving grades, that they're more likely to simply poach better students, and that the quality of private schools swings widely despite a few positive stories. She's noted that the standardized testing from NCLB has simply been setting a lower bar while students continue to decline in standardized tests that haven't changed over the years.
That's not to gloss over the issues that liberals bring to the table in supporting teacher's unions. Moving to a more creative, more individualized issue of study would require ditching much of standardized testing as well as reducing the benefits of tenure that the old guard of the teachers' unions support, in order to encourage younger teachers to be experiment. It's also going to mean that we need parents who will oblige when teachers want to stop teaching to the test and try slightly "dangerous" things. It's also going to mean that those creative younger teachers are going to need to be paid a salary due to talented people - it's sort of a free market principle that good talent won't work for cheap.
All of those things do not neatly fit into a left-right spectrum. It's more about libertarian-vs.-authoritarian, and the leaders of both parties in the U.S. right now fall to the authoritarian side of their parties' values.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in:
Oh I have no doubt that there exists significantly better ways of educating children. What I dispute is that somehow public schools are intellectual deathtraps, and furthermore the corollary that most slashdot posters raise is that somehow non-public schools are better, which is ridiculous.
I don't see any downfall, as we all understand that Government Policy and Unions are the best route to go. As evidenced here.
It's all very well that anyone can pull themselves out of poverty if they try hard enough, but the truth is that someone has to be at the bottom, and only a few can get to the top. The system is built that way. The fact that some Hispanic kids did well (good for them) merely means that fewer black kids did well somewhere else (or white kids or yellow kids, or whichever).
Someone has to drive the bus, sweep the streets, load the lorry, stack the shelves, and so on... and one way of choosing who those people will be is as good as another. Only a racist would complain that this or that group are over or under 'represented'.
from TFA:"Most of us, educators included, learned what we know of Escalante's experience from Stand and Deliver... the film was 90 percent truth and 10 percent drama -- but what a difference 10 percent can make."
Educators are treating a Hollywood film like a documentary? WTF? But I'm not surprised. I've worked in education for 15 years, and it seems like the only time academicians do any research is when they're publishing. The rest of the time, it's best guesses and gut instincts. Unbelievable.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
They wanted to erase all trace of Escalante because he tried to teach. This is contrary to purpose as Gatto explains in his famous essay and Stuart Williams exposed in his secret diary http://www.bbc.co.uk/shropshire/features/2004/04/secret_diary_of_the_telford_teacher.shtml. Highlighting the shortcomings off your fellow teachers, administration, trade union and elected officials is the same as being Piggy in Lord of the Flies - and I'm not linking to the wiki entry on William Goldsmith, since that book is one we reserve for the punishment block (along with: 1984, Moby Dick and A Clockwork Orange).
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
John Taylor Gatto was New York City Teacher of the year 3 years in a row. Soon after that, he quit teaching for good! That's what happens when you stand out in a culture of mediocrity -- it pisses everybody else off. In most private companies, if you produce exceptional results, people kiss your ass. In the public sector, you often get punished for it. It's not just schools -- I've heard similar complaints about working for the USPS and the military.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
that line still follows me through this day
CA has tons of illegals and immigrants in the system and I can tell you from where I am (midwest) those people often test lower and its not because they have a low IQ it is the tests themselves that fail to measure them equally against the locals.
On top of that big problem, you have all the issues of measuring IQ and how that is impossible...
Its more telling in Louisiana and Mississippi because they don't have those excuses and some of those illiterate teacher stories come from there... but again its just an IQ test and doesn't mean a whole lot.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You're absolutely right.
The so-called "welfare class" does not want to better themselves at all. Nor do those whose livelihood is based upon maintaining that perverted status quo (i.e. the Garfield school staff who pushed Escalante out and trashed his work). All that this class of people want to do is suck the money, life and soul out of everyone else who does work hard to better themselves as if to punish them for being successful.
And the saddest truth is that this class has now taken over our federal government, and also at least a half dozen of the state governments, and driven a death blow to this once-great nation, from which it most likely will never recover.
Or was it merely a testament to how memorable Escalante's teaching methods were, that all of his students remembered very well the material and how he covered it? The self-appointed guardians of "real" knowledge, including ETS, will never accept that outsiders have something to contribute, until forced to.
Having identical stuff on an exam is no big deal. My very first semester in college included a course in Pascal, and my final exam included a couple code-writing exercises. I was the second one to finish, and the instructor showed me an answer on the first student's exam. The only difference between his code and mine was symbol names; the compiled code would have been identical.
The ETS and the teaching establishment at Garfield High don't want students to learn. They just want kids to regurgitate, without any real understanding of the material. Heaven forbid, they might start thinking for themselves.
The Reason article was so frustrating to read. Here we see a gifted teacher who demonstrated a vastly better way to teach mathematics, and for all his success, he ends up having to leave the school. Worst of all, no one except his students seemed to learn from him. The techniques he used could be studied and applied to schools around the country. Not all teachers could have the same impact as Escalante, but surely they could make serious improvements.
Instead, we get counter-productive programs such as No Child Left Behind. We get an educational system deathly afraid of change. We invest more in our under-performing kids than we do in the exceptional ones. We are insane.
i google stand and deliver, but i don't think that was a math movie
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Interesting. in Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx says
The only thing I would add to your post is that most of your statements above that begin with "If" have actually happened, so perhaps those sentences should be written with "When" instead of "If."
For some reason, we no longer teach American History 1920-1940 in this country....
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
"Garfield has never replicated Escalante's success with math students, and Reason Magazine reported on the shameful way in which others tore down what Escalante and his teachers worked so hard to build."
No, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that at least one grad student took Escalante's message and intentions to heart (along with those of Al Martin, founder of the goal based rather than years based Alpha School near Portland OR), and was so inspired that when he was tasked with teaching, he earned the highest student evaluations of any member of his department (6 out of 14 evaluations being perfect 5 of 5), and his students earned (not bought, not jumped through hoops, earned) 1 full GPA point higher average grade than any taking those same classes for 10 years previous. His students also produced valid, reliable, replicable original results which they took to international conferences, as well as replicating work by big names and showing where the errors lie that invalidated those accepted works. 10 years on and medically retired, and he still gets contacted by a few more of them every year to let him know it worked. Blacksburg VA isn't easy L.A., but that doesn't mean it's not useful and needed outside the poverty stricken areas.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"Escalante" is close to the word "escalera", which is Spanish for "stairway". Jaime Escalante was indeed a stairway to knowledge for his students.
how do i reeeech thez keeeeeds....u must learn to cheeeeet like white peeeople
Perhaps you'd find it easier to understand why people opposes something if you stopped thinking of them with big monolithic labels like "the left".
There are three big reasons people oppose vouchers.
First, a lot of vouchers would end up subsidizing religious education. Previous posts have covered this issue. I'll just comment that it's pretty sad when anybody who doesn't want taxpayer support of religion is dismissed as a "leftist". How is it left-wing to not want a theocracy?
Then there's the privilege issue. A lot of vouchers would up subsidizing exclusive schools that just aren't open to most people. Mostly it would be about money, but private schools are going to exclude for all kinds of reasons. I know the left is the one that tends to carp the most about the rich and powerful getting government goodies. But that's just ideology. Conservative ideology tends to cut the rich a bit more slack, but it seems pretty clear that people with plain conservative ideals and values are a little less tolerant. How many middle-American ordinary Republicans were happy about Enron, the more recent stupidity and greed on Wall Street? Does it make sense to you that if you lose your job you get nothing, but if your CEO loses his his he gets millions in golden parachute? And to top this off, you want to subsidize the fancy private school his kids go to?
Finally, there's what the Chinese call the iron rice bowl issue: teachers who like things the way they are and use their union clout to make sure nothing changes. Now technically, I guess that's a lefty thing, since unions are involved. But how lefty are most teachers? Almost all the ones that taught me were pretty damn conservative. I seem to recall seeing a lot of pro-republican and NRA bumper stickers when I walk past the teacher parking lot in high school.
And hey, guess who's out to break this iron rice bowl? A certain "socialist" President who always been in favor of charter schools and who now supports total layoffs at failing schools. Where he (and I) draw the line is diverting public education money into private schools that the public has no say in running.
Hooooowwww do i reeeeeeach these keeedz?
.. our natural ability detection mechanisms like IQ tests all suck ass.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
(I was a new teacher then.) And there was jealousy from other teachers about administration's treatment of him (he was the only one Principal Tostado didn't pick on) to his treatment of himself (had a heart attack while working there, by way of warning to the rest of the teachers of the perils of working THAT hard. It also made for some macabre conversations: "Why don't you work as hard as Mr. Escalante?" "I don't want to die."
Cranky educator.
When a mathematics teacher gets old he loses count. There are a number of people that I owe big time for my maths ability.
If I had not had a maths teacher who stood everyone up at the beginning of the lesson and you only got to sit down when you had
successfully answered a question -- I would not have been able to pass the exams at the end of the year. Mr. Smith was his name
and I am always grateful for his ability to motivate people who are less able when it comes to maths. Heck I was lazy when I was young.
I am aware that his former students would most likely do anything for him, as I am aware of my debt to Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith where
ever you are - I think of you occasionally when I'm working on a maths question.
I saw a blog recently that brought to focus some of the things that have happened to me.
http://www.prositos.com.au/blog/prositos/2010/Going-down-the-Gurgler
When you are broke and going down the tube faster than an ice skater - it is nice to know that there are some people who genuinely
care about what happens to others.
Our future is what we make it. It has not been written yet. What will we make it be?
Decisions we made are still shaping events of the "now" and the "future".
I should have bought a home with the divorce settlement way back 14 years ago. A down payment would have been enough to
send me down a brighter path. Today I'm old and broke. Unfortunately I have not inspired anyone to have higher aspirations than
when I met them. No-one has told me that I did and I was a Science teacher for a good eight years.
At least "Jaime Escalante" did achieve a lot in his life-time. He will be remembered and his method may be taken up by
someone else, some-place-else.