Super Math Teacher Jaime Escalante

After teaching at San Fernando High School for 23 years, I chose an early retirement with a deep sense of frustration. After our physics teacher took an unexpected medical leave in the middle of the year, I volunteered to cover the class as best I could. With only two semesters of physics for the non-physics major, I still had more physics than any other teacher in the school! Finishing up that first year was dreadful. I knew that the students knew more than I did. We winged it.

During the following years I went back to college, got myself and all the scattered physics lab equipment moved to the old physics room, organized the equipment and got it working, and bought textbooks that I could understand. The class became a real physics class, though I never lectured much. We did labs, all 50 of them, gathered data, put it in tables, transferred it to graphs, and came up with universal truths.

However, all this work was destroyed when, as the enrollment of 12 in physics grew over a few years, to 42! I went to the principal to say that I could not teach a lab course of 42. I was ignored until I pointed out that the class was no longer a magnet class as there were too many non-magnet students. Then I was given another teacher to co-teach the course.

Forty-two students in physics was bad. But, poor Mrs. Rubinstein had 44 students in her Grade 12 honors English class. This was just one of her five classes. She developed, as she said, a stress cough.

After three years I miss teaching, but life as a caretaker on the ranch is pleasant and non-stressful, and I am finding fulfillment in helping to organize the Josephine Scripps’ mineral and gem collection for future donation to the San Diego Natural History Museum and other museums.

Escalante’s defeat is my defeat, is everyone’s defeat.

If we continue to subject our young people to second-class education, we can only expect second-class citizens, which will produce a second-class country. Makes a good formula, doesn’t it?

CHARLES L. SHORT

San Luis Rey