Math Teacher’s Devotion Adds Up to Award

Dominguez High School has changed a bit since math teacher Raul Ubario graduated in 1976. More boys are joining gangs at 14 instead of 18 and “the same thing goes with girls’ getting pregnant,” Ubario noted.

The advanced math program, however, was struggling as much as ever.

Ubario, 34, took over the calculus classes last fall. The number of students taking the course rose from a handful to 80.

Last year, no one tried to earn college credit by taking the advanced placement calculus exam. On May 10, 62 students took the test.

The results are still out. Principal Ernie Roy knows of only one pupil in the history of the Compton Unified School District who ever earned college credit on an advanced placement calculus test. “We’re treading on new ground here,” Roy said.

But for his efforts in stimulating interest in a subject that had gone wanting, Ubario last Thursday was one of five Los Angeles County math teachers to win the top prize in the Jaime Escalante Mathematics Teacher Awards. The awards are named for the Garfield High School math teacher whose accomplishments were dramatized in the movie “Stand and Deliver.”

Ubario, a Mexican immigrant, dropped out of school in Mexico at the age of 12 to go to work. “My destiny was written,” he said. “I would have to start learning some trade like making sweaters or selling tomatoes.”

His family’s move to Los Angeles allowed him to complete his education. He earned an electrical engineering degree and a master’s in industrial arts.

Ubario still attends school. At Cal State Dominguez Hills, he just finished a calculus class that included some of his former students. Ubario was there to review his knowledge and learn different teaching strategies.

“He is a person who has actually gone through what the students in his class are going through,” said former student Walter Perez, a native of El Salvador who now attends UC Irvine. “He understands the students’ problems. He makes them feel he is not just a teacher, but a friend.”

Ubario drives students to job interviews and finds work for former students as teacher aides. He has sponsored fund-raisers for college tuition. In some cases, he quietly dipped into his own wallet to help pay for college calculus courses.

Ubario has recruited his entire family to help. He will soon raffle his brother’s bike to pay the tab for economically disadvantaged students who took the advanced placement exam. Another brother has hired six of Ubario’s students for a construction job. And Ubario’s mother volunteered to represent students at parent-teacher conferences when a student’s own parents do not come to school.

His students become his extended family, and Ubario said he is constantly pulled between students and his own family. Ubario has a 4-year-old daughter and a 20-month-old son.

Ubario is particularly pleased to win an award named after Jaime Escalante. Ubario saves Escalante clippings in a three-ring binder and has his autograph. He watched Escalante teach a class last fall and took copious notes.

The Escalante Award ranks with a plaque that Ubario’s students gave him. The inscription reads: “The class took a vote and we all agree you are the greatest teacher and friend.”

In the classroom, Ubario is perpetual motion.

By 10:30, smears of yellow chalk cover his conservative gray dress pants. Yellow dust cakes his hands. He draws and erases formula after formula, graph after graph in a gallop through the day. The chalk snaps in his hand twice an hour. “Cheap chalk,” he said quickly and keeps writing.

His teaching style is part rhythm. “Boom, boom, boom,” he said, urging his student through a quiz. As students work out problems on the board, he dons a cowboy hat, claps his hands and taps his left foot.

Then he wants students in rows. “Give me six, six, six,” he said. “Notes, notes, notes,” he announces.

A student does not have paper, so Ubario gives him some and adds, “I’m going to give you a nickel to buy 5 cents worth of memory.” A student wins a dollar for catching Ubario making a computation mistake.

To get into calculus this year, all a student had to do was ask, and be willing to work. Ubario helps students before school, after school and on Saturday mornings. He plans organized help sessions throughout the summer.

“We have seen students who are doing poorly and seen them grow,” he said. “Not only in my class, but in all their classes.”

Ubario puts in extra effort because many students do not get the help elsewhere. “A lot of them live with single parents,” he said. “Their parents get minimum wages. I know of a parent, she’s a single mother. She works many hours, leaves early and comes home at 7 in the night.

“Many kids don’t finish high school. They are pulled out to work to help the family. It might be that the family needs the money, but usually those kids don’t come back.”

Last year’s ninth-grade class had nearly 800 students. The senior class had 261. The families of many students live in the area a month or a year and then move to search for work elsewhere. The dropout rate is high. Most of the student body qualifies for free school lunches under a poverty-relief program.

The school, which is 54% Latino, has many recent immigrants who do not speak English. That is why Ubario will explain parabolas and derivatives in Spanish as well as English.

Besides his four calculus classes, Ubario has two classes he filled with students who were failing other math classes or who were too disruptive.

He teaches them the same way as his calculus students. He throws away textbooks and starts having fun, using numerous props and materials he has prepared himself.

“I’ve been with him for three years,” senior Christopher Jeffries said. “I watched him teach students who barely knew how to do three-digit multiplication, and he was teaching them Algebra II by the end of the year. He’s teaching his Algebra I class calculus, and I don’t think they even know it.”