Stand & Deliver Part 1

The first half of Stand and Deliver showed me that Mr. Escalante is a very strong willed and dedicated teacher. He starts off getting a job at Garfield high school in Los Angeles, which turns out to be a vastly underfunded school with a mostly underprivileged immigrant student body. the school is so underfunded that he was brought in to be a computer sciences teacher and was moved into teaching Math 1A aka Basic Math because the school could not afford to have computers. Even worse than that the school's massive underfunding caused a shortage in desks so students had to compete for a place to sit down in class!

When he first arrives to the classroom he finds his students to be uncommitted to education and in some cases completely uninterested in learning. He even has do deal with some of the tougher gang affiliated kids making threats to his personal safety. His first day there is a colossal failure as he failed to reach the students in any way. But the next day he is prepared for them. He starts to use humor to reach them and at first some resist but over time he develops a way of communicating to the kids with their own language while still forcing them to rise to the standard he set for them. He eventually implements a system of embarrassing students who don’t try to succeed thus reversing the social norm they are used to. He uses a few crude tactics to keep these kids engaged in his class but they work and soon he has all his students eager to learn. Mr. Escalante makes it clear that he is a firm believer in the notion that students will only rise to the bar you set for them and because of this, decides to teach them Algebra instead of Basic Math.

Though other teachers have given up on these kids Mr. Escalante pushes forward with his crude yet effective teaching style and gets great results teaching algebra to kids deemed unfit for basic math. He decides, to the chagrin of other teachers, he is going to take it one step further and teach his students calculus in order to prepare them for an AP test and earn them college credit. after some struggle with parents that had their own agendas for their kids, agendas that had no need for better education and no input from the kid themselves, he gets his students into a summer calculus program and begins vigourisly teaching them. What happens next I’ll just have to wait for part two to find out. However if they fallow typical Hollywood formula there will be some tragedy (typically a sad death) and then ultimately success. (In this case the students passing the AP test.)