Jaime Escalante

WORD OF THE DAY
PERSONAL CONTEXT
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
SUCCESS PRINCIPLE
CIVICS LESSON

DETERMINE YOUR SELF-IMAGE

The key to my success with youngsters is a very simple and time-honored tradition:
hard work for teacher and student alike.
Jaime Escalante

Born and raised in Bolivia, 33-year-old Jaime Escalante immigrated to the U.S. in 1963 seeking a better life for his family, with an English vocabulary of little more than “yes” or “no”. Escalante enrolled in English classes at Pasadena City College while mopping floors and flipping burgers in a diner across the street from the school. Intent on a return to the educational career that he’d given up when he left Bolivia, he earned his teaching credentials at Cal State Los Angeles and started teaching high school math in the fall of 1974. Confronted with underperforming students, Escalante set high standards and motivated them to study calculus before school, after school and on weekends. Within a few years he had them passing the AP calculus exam. Escalante’s students were so successful that by 1987, only four U.S. high schools had had better performing students on the AP calculus exam than his. His accomplishments received such national attention that he was featured in a book “Escalante: The Best Teacher in America” and a film, “Stand and Deliver”. College Board president Gaston Caperton described his impact:

Jaime Escalante has left a deep and enduring legacy in the struggle for academic equity in American education. His passionate belief was that all students, when properly prepared and motivated, can succeed at academically demanding course work, no matter what their racial, social or economic background. Because of him, educators everywhere have been forced to revise long-held notions of who can succeed.

Escalante decided who he wanted to be and encouraged his students to transcend their circumstances and strive for educational excellence – to become their very best. Meditate on his words; let them inspire you to do the same. You can make it happen as you:

DETERMINE YOUR SELF-IMAGE 
One of the greatest things you have in life is that no one has the authority to tell you what you want to be. You’re the one who’ll decide what you want to be. Respect yourself and respect the integrity of others as well. The greatest thing you have is your self image, a positive opinion of yourself. You must never let anyone take it from you.

DECLARE HIGH EXPECTATIONS 
If we expect kids to be losers they will be losers; if we expect them to be winners they will be winners. They rise, or fall, to the level of the expectations of those around them, especially their parents and their teachers.

DEDICATE YOURSELF TO THE JOURNEY 
Life is not about how many times you fall down. It’s about how many times you get back up.

DEVELOP YOUR FUTURE
.. . I tell my students, you do not enter the future – you create the future. The future is created through hard work.

DISCOVER THE RIGHT QUESTIONS TO ASK
Ask ‘How will they learn best?’ not ‘Can they learn?’

DON’T QUIT
The day someone quits school he is condemning himself to a future of poverty.

DEVOTE TO YOUR MISSION
My friends said, ‘Jaime, you’re crazy.’ But I wanted to work with young people. That’s more rewarding for me than the money.

KEY POINTS

WORD OF THE DAY
Transcend – to rise above or go beyond the ordinary limits of; to outdo or exceed in excellence, extent, degree, etc.

PERSONAL CONTEXT  
Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutiérrez was born in 1930 in Bolivia. The child of poorly paid schoolteachers who worked in the remote Indian villages, Escalante grew up in poverty; he lived with his family of seven in three rented rooms. His father’s death during his teenage years left him without the money to go to college. Escalante became a self-taught physics teacher. When he was 21, without relevant education background or teacher training, Escalante started teaching physics, having learned the relevant skills through trial and error,  by observing others teach the subject. He went on to study at  University Mayor de San Andres, the leading public university in Bolivia and to attain his Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Escalante was part of the post-World War II surge in Latin American immigration to the United States. Beginning in the 1940s over the next three decades, those of Latin American heritage living in the U.S. increased more than three-fold, totally 7.6 million people by 1970. The vast majority of these immigrants were from Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuban. Escalante was among the small number from Bolivia. The revised immigration law enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1965 slowed immigration from Latin America and from Africa and Asia as well.

SUCCESS PRINCIPLE
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CIVICS LESSON
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