Three for the 21st Century : A Scientist, a Musician and an English Teacher. What They’ve Got in Common Are Vision, Enthusiasm and Staying Power. : At East L.A. College, Eduardo Munoz Points to the Path of Social Mobility.

At 5 in the afternoon, Eduardo Munoz is on his third cup of coffee and his 18th blue book. Over the next several days and nights, he will read about 100 more.

The composition books have been all over town today--hauled first to his East L.A. College office, then to a coffee shop, and finally, after a 45-minute drive, back home. The changes of scene--Munoz’s preferred remedy for weary eyes and flagging attention--have helped him get through grading one class so far.

The tally: Eight dropouts. Six D’s. Six C’s. Five B’s. And one A minus.

Munoz’s lips are pressed tightly together. “Terrible!” he finally bursts out, slapping the arm of his chair.

Several students turned in essays so ungrammatical that parts read like gibberish. Few seemed to grasp the point. Most will barely scrape by English 101, this very real first step on the road to middle-class prosperity for poor kids from the Eastside.

The grim showing is in line with the odds at East L.A. College. The school serves an area with a poverty rate that is among the region’s highest. Seventy-eight percent of students are Latino; 45% speak English as a second language. Among those who take Munoz’s classes are young men and women who have never known a family member with a college degree, have never read a novel.

Teachers like Munoz, 34, end up confronting all that is irreconcilable in the state’s public education system: K-12 schools have fallen short. Barriers to four-year universities have grown higher. The job of the community college teacher is to bridge the gap. It doesn’t always work.

East L.A. College loses 44% of its students after the first year, district officials say. Of the school’s just over 16,000-plus students, less than 5% head to a four-year college in a given year.

Last year, just 104 transferred to University of California campuses, the college’s highest goal for students.

Eduardo Munoz could have been among those who drifted away. One of nine children of a Spanish-speaking Huntington Park couple, he came to East L.A. College in 1983 as an aimless C student. He started in remedial classes with vague hopes of becoming a telephone repairman. He left 3 1/2 years later as a UC Berkeley transfer student who would eventually complete graduate studies in English and sociolinguistics at Cal State L.A. The breakthrough, Munoz says, came partly with the simple discovery that he could earn A’s--something he had long doubted.

Munoz remembers the self-consciousness he felt walking into Berkeley’s lecture halls. He knows what it’s like to be mistaken for a Moroccan, a custodian or a street tough, to feel vulnerable and awkward, like one traveling in a foreign country. He knows what it’s like to grow cocky rather than be “almost shattered” by the experience of changing worlds. He knows the other side, too, coming back home to be told, to his mortification, that he “sounds white.”

He wants his students to have some perspective on their world view and move beyond it. “I do everything I can to pull back the curtain and let them see what’s behind it,” he says.

Most days that means rising at 5:30 a.m, to commute across town, going from the Redondo Beach home he now shares with his wife to East L.A.’s sunbaked Monterey Park campus.

With its high, sunlit paned windows and linoleum floors, the college recalls the idealized California high schools of television shows. But here and there, the walls are tagged with graffiti, and there is litter in the bushes. Scruffy roses attest to cutbacks in the gardeners’ ranks.

On the first day of spring semester, Munoz keeps open the classroom door to let the early morning sun stream in. The room is decorated with torn masking tape and a creased Lufthansa airline poster. His students sit leaning forward, so silent the rustle of backpacks seems loud.

The first lesson of English 103 is his own life story. Munoz is unabashed about his failures, unapologetic about his successes. The point is not simply to give a pep talk, but to show students that success is a matter of learning strategies--how to study, how to be prepared in ways that are not just on paper.

“I am standing in front of future attorneys, social activists . . . doctors,” he tells them. “I am standing in front of the future governor of California.”

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This is a place where open windows serve for air conditioning, where amenities, from pencil sharpeners to polished wooden chairs, are so old and quaint that they could be sold as vintage. When Munoz wants to close his aging file cabinet, he presses a book against it and bangs it hard.

But the job’s rewards far outweigh its drawbacks, Munoz says. It allows him to concentrate on teaching without research pressures. His students, he says, are traveling along sometimes slow and bumpy paths--progressing, as he did, in ways that elude statistical generalization.

True, 70% of the students here need some kind of remedial help, and teachers are deluged with calls from students who must cut class to care for a sick child or work an unscheduled shift.

But there are just enough triumphs here to justify optimism, and far too many to allow a moment’s cynicism.

“I see students so sharp, so intelligent . . . .” Munoz says. Many of those earning poor grades now have the potential to do well at four-year universities--”but not in two or three years. It’s time. Time . . . . It’s not gonna happen in one semester.”

He picks up an essay marked with a D and shakes it. “I don’t see this student as a failure,” he says. “I see him as being on a different calendar.”

His classes include the D-students who repeat a course in their determination to get a better grade. There are single mothers who smoothly juggle jobs, homework, child care and bus schedules. There are dropouts who return years later to finish, UC- and CSU-qualified students held back by money. There are streetwise C-students, whose indifference masks secret forays to public libraries.

Those who transfer to universities do as well or better than peers who started at four-year schools, says Warren Fox, executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission. They have an edge, Munoz believes, because their journey to universities is not an inevitable progression but the result of re-creating themselves.

He tries to teach students to choose their language--”to move according to the situation.” He tells them to shift from their childhood Spanish or Chinese, to street slang or Spanglish, to formal, academic English. The underlying message: Don’t be trapped, not by your world view, your language or your crowded apartment in Monterey Park. Move easily between the worlds of white and brown, educated and working class. Claim them all.

“Shifting is survival,” he says.

It’s a subtle idea. But Munoz perseveres, believing social mobility is not just a matter of paying tuition, or completing a class. It’s a psychological leap, a sometimes wrenching assault on the familiar.

Munoz alludes to his older brother, who is in prison and addicted to crack cocaine. “He was inclined toward the familiar,” he says.

Munoz--still “Eddie” to his friends--looks so young he is often mistaken for student. He is earnest and intense, peppering his speech with such phrases as, “check this out,” and “trip out on this.”

Listen closely and you hear the soft-cornered consonants of East L.A.--not at all a Spanish accent, rather a hint of ancestral language preserved like a family token. Munoz, says one student, 19-year-old Vianey Favela, is the only teacher on campus who “talks normal.”

He talks his students’ language in more profound ways too. Luis Hernandez started school as a retail clerk in an outlet mall, taking remedial classes while still “messing around in the streets.” He took an English class from Munoz, thinking, “I’ll just get a C and move on . . . . I got other worries.” He was working 40 hours a week and his girlfriend was pregnant.

But when Munoz traced for the class his own life story, Hernandez was hooked. He took the full course of college-credit honors English from Munoz, and earned A’s. In English 101, students write a paper on an ideology. Hernandez chose Marxism.

He had never worked so hard on anything. He got an A. The paper is framed and hangs on the wall of the home in Commerce he shares with his girlfriend and baby son. Hernandez, now 24, has just been accepted to Whittier College. He starts in February.

“It was like he was talking to me personally,” Hernandez says of Munoz. “His same life story is my life story . . . . It got to me.”