Jaime Escalante
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Jaime Escalante is a former Los Angeles Unified School District mathematics teacher who achieved national fame when his highly successful math class was dramatized in Stand and Deliver.
After many fruitful years of preparing Garfield High School teenagers, in East Los Angeles, California for the Calculus AP test, Escalante retired to his native Bolivia.
Escalante has described the film as "90% truth, 10%" drama. Points left out of the film:
- it took him several years to achieve the kind of success shown in the film
- in no case was a student who didn't know multiplication tables or fractions taught calculus in a single year
- Escalante suffered a gall-bladder attack, not a heart attack. This distinction was clouded in the movie.
The movie was based on a book called Escalante:The Best Teacher in America by Jay Mathews (ISBN: 0805011951), which is more in-depth and arguably better than the movie.
External links
- Stand and Deliver Revisited: The untold story (http://reason.com/0207/fe.jj.stand.shtml)