A Matter of Style : Math Teacher’s Methods Draw Praise--and a Probe

As Manual Arts High geared up for its annual homecoming dance and football game on a recent Friday afternoon, a sense of anticipation filled the Los Angeles campus.

But in Room 235, Jim Horsman’s Algebra II students hunkered down at their desks, sweating over their daily quiz. Their task: to solve three equations and one word problem--the bane of math students since before Pythagoras dreamed of theorems.

Daily quizzes are only one of the challenges posed by Horsman, who has patterned himself after Jaime Escalante, the calculus teacher from East Los Angeles whose success with disadvantaged youths was celebrated in the 1988 movie “Stand and Deliver.”

Like Escalante, Horsman says he sees math as a vehicle to help youths succeed in life and is earning a reputation for his ability to mold growing numbers of low-income and minority students into calculus whizzes.

And like Escalante, he has sometimes gotten into trouble for a confrontational style.

“Self-esteem is not built by saying, ‘You’re a nice person,’ ” Horsman maintains. “You solve a math problem correctly, and this is what builds self-esteem.”

Students who enroll in a Horsman class face homework each night. They sit through harangues against dropping out in which their teacher cites role models such as black economist Thomas Sowell. They grapple with Horsman’s sometimes uncomfortable teaching style, which challenges students by using reverse psychology.

“He’d say, ‘I bet you can’t do this,’ ” recalled Willie Rodriguez, 18, a former Horsman student now majoring in electrical engineering at USC. “He’d say things about the number of minorities who don’t go to college and I started to see that it was true, and that’s why I stayed and worked hard.”

Rodriguez was not the only one. Last year, 17 students passed the Advanced Placement calculus test, earning advanced math placement when they reach college. Eight of his high school students are taking Calculus III at USC. The successes have grown steadily since Horsman founded the calculus program in 1986.

Horsman has also come under fire for his methods. Several black students--one is the student body president--have accused him of making racist and threatening comments in class. They say his tactics lower their self-esteem but that peer pressure has kept them from publicly voicing their complaints.

“He scares the students,” said Margaret Henderson, whose niece, Tiaqia Lewis, studied calculus with Horsman. “He uses coercion and intimidation and tells them he’s their Great White Hope, their only way out of the ghetto. It’s like brainwashing,” she said.

Also, some teachers fear that he is insensitive to the needs of black students, who usually have scored lower in advanced math than Anglos and Latinos. Manual Arts is 70% Latino and 30% black, but blacks do less well in Horsman’s math classes.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Unified School District began an investigation. Officials have declined to talk about the allegations or allow students to discuss specific complaints.

Horsman, who says the criticisms have left him shaken and unable to sleep at night, denies making any racist comments.

“I don’t look at the world as black and white and Latino,” the tall, bespectacled teacher said. “What I’m interested in is what’s the best way for kids to learn mathematics.”

A doctoral candidate in economics who dropped out of USC to teach disadvantaged students, Horsman says it took time to adjust to life in a classroom. “At first I really despised it. I had no idea how to teach. The results were very dismal.”

After six years, Horsman has fashioned a formula of daily quizzes and drills, using a building-block approach in which students master a concept thoroughly before moving on.

“It’s very sequential, very repetitive,” he said. “I start them off with simple problems and they see they can do it, and then we move to harder problems, and when they see their success, they feel good about themselves.”

After a recent quiz, Horsman went over the answers, explaining that “the numbers are a little bit uglier now, and the exponents are a little larger but it’s still the same thing you did in fourth grade.”

Sometimes, he writes obviously wrong answers on the board to see if students are awake. When a boy in the front row corrects him, Horsman barks out “check” and shakes the student’s hand.

He enforces academics in a variety of ways. Problem students might be invited to play a few rounds of golf with Horsman, a golf aficionado. Others might receive books on evolution or math trivia. Tardy students might have to do pushups, with Horsman joining along.

Some of those tactics have backfired. Henderson says she was appalled to find that her niece, Tiaqia, apparently broke her arm while doing a pushup in what school officials say must have been a freak accident. Henderson said her niece at first was too intimidated by Horsman to tell her family how she injured herself.

Another Manual Arts graduate, Margarita Perez, said Horsman sometimes kicked chairs over when he got angry. She said she transferred out of his Algebra II class after he threatened to fail her for being late.

Horsman’s fans--including 100 students who wrote letters of support recently to the school’s principal--speak of a teacher who works during lunch, after school and on weekends to help them understand math. They say that by proving theorems they can prove to themselves--often for the first time in their lives--that the brain is a weapon as powerful as any gun.

“I was used to classes where, if you were pretty nice to the teacher, you’d get OK grades,” said Rodriguez, who almost dropped Horsman’s Algebra II class several years ago because it was so hard.

He persevered, and this year, Rodriguez talked his 16-year-old sister, Xochitl, into taking the class. “I told her he gives you a tremendous amount of work, but he also teaches you about life.”

In an interview this week, Escalante threw his support behind Horsman and criticized the district for its failure to stand behind innovative teachers.

“I’m with him,” Escalante said. “I know him well, and I know what he’s going through because I’ve gone through it myself. It’s difficult to succeed if you’re a good teacher. When you start pushing kids, you’re going to have these problems.”

Last year, more than 90 Garfield students passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. Escalante, who has been recognized across the country for his achievements, says lack of support and backbiting at his home campus may eventually drive him out of teaching.

Horsman’s critics say that the Manual Arts teacher is no Escalante. Some say he denigrates other teachers in front of students, exhibiting inappropriate behavior. He has also refused to join the powerful teachers union and speaks out against it.

“He’s alienated quite a few teachers here because of his arrogance,” said Phyllis Williams, a math teacher. “I’m not jealous of him, I applaud anyone who’s having success with students. But I question his ability to work . . . with all the students we have in the district.”

Williams also accuses Horsman of elitism, saying that “he once asked me why I waste my time trying to teach gangbangers,” she said.

At least one former gang member, Lindorfe Gallegos, said Horsman helped lead him out of gang life.

“He’d call me at home Sunday and say, ‘Did you do my homework?’ And I’d do it just to get him off my back,” said the 18-year-old, who is majoring in chemical engineering at UC Davis.

“This man is important to Manual Arts,” Gallegos said. “He cares a lot. He . . . thrives on the fact that you say ‘go away,’ and he just comes right back and says, here, do these problems. Horsman got to me, and it really bothered me. I hated him at first. But I needed that push, because otherwise I’d still be hanging out with the guys,” Gallegos said.

Horsman is clearly proud, even boastful, of his success: District administrators say Manual Arts “does very well” in Advanced Placement calculus, even when measured against more wealthy, high-achieving schools, but they declined to disclose its ranking for fear of demoralizing less successful schools.

Horsman attributes his love of education to growing up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, the son of a truck driver father and waitress mother, neither finishing ninth grade.

“My education was extremely important to me,” he said. “It helped me live a much happier life.

“There are a lot of problems in L.A. schools and I’m doing something positive,” Horsman said. “People think kids are very stupid, but they’re not. If they walk into my class, they learn math. If my students hated me and hated going to class, I could understand, but that’s not the case at all.”

Richard Vladovic, a former principal of Locke High School, a predominantly black school where Horsman taught from 1984-86, recalls him as a brilliant eccentric who used to play chess with the school computer and win.

“Like all new teachers, he had problems with things like discipline, but he was very conscientious” said Myron Lockrem, who headed Locke’s math department. “He reached quite a few (students). Of course, those who didn’t want to get motivated might have felt they were being pushed too hard.”

Horsman’s superiors said he moved to Manual Arts in early 1986 after Locke suffered a drop in enrollment and had to reconfigure its math department. Neither man recalls any allegations of racism while Horsman was at Locke.

The controversy at Manual Arts troubles teachers who worry that he is using the achievements of his best students to deflect legitimate concerns about his methods. Others are not so sure, but they applaud the investigation anyway.

“It is valid because historically there has been so much racism and it has such an awesome effect on students,” said Donald Bakeer, a former Manual Arts teacher who is at Washington Preparatory School near Inglewood.

Bakeer said his daughter, who took a math class from Horsman, disliked the teacher and considered him immature and tactless.

“She didn’t say anything about him being racist, and her antenna is up about that,” Bakeer said.

For Bakeer, the Horsman controversy also brings home the fact that talented and dynamic teachers are often forced out of schools where they are most needed.

“Manual Arts has . . . difficulty in getting teachers because it is the front lines. Guys like Horseman . . . are a heck of a resource if used correctly. Getting 17 kids to pass the AP calculus at Manual, that’s almost unbelievable.”