Teacher serves as inspiration for 'Stand and Deliver'
High school math teacher motivates L.A. school
By Orrin Konheim, staff writer
Posted on April 3, 2006

After delivering his speech, Jaime Escalante takes time out of interviews and handshakes for an eager parent and her daughter who wanted him to demonstrate a multiplication trick he did on stage with his fingers. Escalante takes out a piece of paper and wows the pair with all sorts of calculations — that could otherwise only be done with a calculator or tireless arithmetic — and suddenly math becomes fun again.

Escalante, who served as the inspiration for the film, “Stand and Deliver,” came to speak at the Festival Center Grand Ballroom last Wednesday. The program was sponsored by the Center for Multi-Cultural Student Services and the Latin-American fraternity Lambda Upsilon Lambda.

The famed math teacher, who took a high school in the ghettos of Los Angeles and made them the seventh-highest scoring AP calculus school in the nation, spent most of his time talking about his attitudes on education and reminiscing with humorous stories. He also spoke very humbly about the 1988 movie and what inspired it.

“Really, I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I’m just helping my students.”

A former school teacher in Bolivia, Escalante immigrated to the United States in 1964 where he worked for the Barrows Corporation in Pasadena, Calif., before taking a pay cut to teach at Garfield High School. Upon his arrival, Garfield was ranked last among all of the schools in Los Angeles.

“When I got there, I thought I’d just teach one semester,” Escalante said, “But at the end of the semester, nothing would change. Those students would just go back to where they were before.”

Escalante ended up staying with those students for the remainder of the year and that summer he thought he would try to get them ahead by teaching them trigonometry. However, he didn’t get support from the school principal, the parents, and even some of the students themselves. He finally found an ally at the local community college who lent him room space for the summer and later showed him an AP calculus booklet and suggested he try teaching it.

“It’s about what you can get if you make them believe in themselves,” he said about his philosophy. “The biggest pleasure you’ll ever have in life is your self image.”

The actual events and story follows closely to the script. The reason for this was that the movie’s star, Edward James Olmos, called Escalante and told him he had read the script and planned on doing his own research because he grew up in that neighborhood. Olmos went to Garfield High and was in utter disbelief that about the story.

It was thanks to Olmos’s diligent research that Escalante was able to reunite with some of his students. One of his more memorable stories was about a reunion with a student nicknamed “The Fingerman,” who was clearly thankful for the opportunity Escalante had given him, but still holds a grudge because thanks to him and the movie, his nickname has stuck with him for life. Escalante treasures his accomplishments most with students like “The Fingerman” who are hard to motivate.

“Especially those ones without any interest or without any desire to learn. Oh yeah, that motivates me,” he said. “A huge percentage of these kids are the lazy kids and the kids on my team already have in mind where they’re going and how to get there.”

He regularly meets with his former students when he’s in L.A. and they talk about how to bring back the program to the old neighborhood. Since leaving the school system after a dispute with the teacher union, his original high school has stopped the program, but Escalante’s legacy did not die. His program has been emulated in Colorado, Texas and schools all over California.