RIP, Jaime Escalante, and God be good to you!

If a movie hadn't been made about this man's life, none of us may ever have heard of him. That would have been our loss.

The movie was Stand and Deliver. Some may find it memorable because Lou Diamond Phillips, among others, was thought to be reasonably hot. I found it memorable because my personal pantheon of heroes grew by one: the teacher, Jaime Escalante. There are parts of Escalante's story  that were left out, and they make him no less a hero to me.

Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian native, and he'd taught in Bolivia before he came to the States. He spoke little English when he got here. He took night classes for some years in order to be certified to teach in California. He taught math in a tough east L.A. high school. He got the radical idea that these kids he taught - hard, tough kids who'd been told all their lives about nothing but their limitations - could be taught math. Not plain, ordinary math - he started an AP calculus program at the school. His students did very well, indeed, and that tough school in a nasty, gang-infested neighborhood in Los Angeles was among the top performers in math in the country for years.Talk about a lasting impact!

So, RIP, Jaime, may God be good to you. Vaya con dios.

There's much that I took from that movie, from that life. For the last three years I was in a call center (actually, 3-1/2 years, counting the time I was with a group that was reevaluating and rewriting the training program) I was in a teaching function. I tried to not ever forget that, before you cam teach - calculus, customer service, credit policies, whatever - the first thing you can teach MUST be:

You. can. do. this. I have faith in you.

I thank all those who have taught, and are teaching this to me. I thank those who have come from abroad and taught it to their students; I'm thinking Jaime Escalante and Frank McCourt. I'm thinking of those who will be: my nephew William and my daughter Cheryl. Thanks to all!

So thank you, Jaime, for teaching. Thank you for a life well-lived. And thanks for teaching students the most important lesson of all:

You. can. do. this.