Escalante

John Kusel taught Biology on the Access course for many years. It was great for Access students to meet such an eminent academic as they took their first steps towards university study. Neither he nor I are involved in Access any more but we've both retained an interest in that project and we have regular chats about it. John continues to be a source of insight and inspiration - as well as additions to my personal reading list. He lent me Escalante: The Best Teacher in America by Jay Matthews.

Jaime Escalante was a Bolivian who spent most of his working life in the USA, teaching mathematics in a Los Angeles high school. He came to the attention of the rest of the USA in 1982 when 16 of his students in Garfield High School, Los Angeles passed Advanced Placement Calculus. Designed to facilitate progression to College, this is a more advanced Mathematics examination than most taken by American high school students. It was unusual for 16 students from any one school to attempt this examination, never mind actually pass it. That Garfield High was an inner city school with a poorer, substantially Hispanic catchment only compounded the abnormality. Still, none of this might have caught the headlines except for the similarities between some of the students' exam papers which led to suspicion of cheating. In the event most of the students agreed to sit a second exam, passing without any issues and vindicating their original results. In subsequent years more and more Garfield students passed this most testing mathematics examination, highlighting Escalante's rare excellence as a teacher.

I enjoyed the book. It is first and foremost a biography of a very successful teacher and a strong character but we should look for lessons. Surely such a success can be replicated, its key elements extracted and reused? I am, of course, particularly interested in ideas that might be useful with Access-like teaching, for adult students. So here are some thoughts from my own particular perspective, probably still a bit disorganised.

The author, a journalist rather than a teacher or educationalist, aims to draw general lessons in the concluding chapters:

1. "Teachers who bring students up to high standards are precious commodities. ... If good teachers ask for help, give it to them, but only the way they want it."
2. "If left alone, teachers who work hard and care for their students will produce better results than ten times their number dutifully following the ten best recommendations of the ten latest presidential commissions on education."

   "Even the best ideas to come out of the Garfield story probably would have turned rancid if they had first been cooked in a school board committee and reduced to short numbered paragraphs."

3. "... seems to apply just to minorities, but it ought to work with nearly all human children: Demand more than they think they have to give.... the door to that classroom was open to nearly everyone, even students with weak records." Many stories in the book are of people who were not necessarily academic high flyers, or whose backgrounds were particularly challenging. "Calculus need not be made easy; it is easy already"

The first two points, opposing "teachers" and "commissions", address the management of education rather than what individual teachers do. We still have to ask how a teacher can "bring students up to high standards" and why those who can are such "precious commodities". I like the third point. If people wanted to take Maths or Chemistry on Access we asked for some previous knowledge, about the level high school kids would reach at about age 14 or 15. Apart from these requirements our doors were more or less open. Access is based on the belief that "there are many people potentially able to benefit from university who have not had the opportunity" (we used to use those words in the course literature). School is not the right time for many people for a host of reasons, most of them so far beyond the individual's control that they effectively kill off the "opportunity" that school should represent. After school roads back into education are harder to find. I like this attitude in a high school teacher and I imagine it helped some people who were beginning to look unsuccessful. Many of the profiles of individual students were of people who were not academic high flyers. I like that. Perhaps their achievements were all the more impressive because of this.

Teachers may find it more useful to look at his practices and these are described in some detail, brought together in a useful way later on in the book. As he would say himself, there are no great secrets; perhaps the best teachers simply succeed in getting the students to do what everybody knows they should be doing. So, hard work is emphasised, completing and handing in of regular exercises, regular habits: a test every Friday, "...you must take them in class; no make-up tests will be given"; quizzes almost every day, in the class, again with no opportunity to make any that are missed. The sort of notebook to be used is specified, and what goes in it; it is handed in once a week and its contents inspected and graded. No late homework is accepted.

With adults I had to be more flexible. One can't hold it against a student if she misses a class, is late with a homework because her boss insisted she do an extra shift, or because a kid is sick or the normal childcare arrangements fall through. Handing in of exercises can't be extended forever but there has to be a degree of flexibility.

This demanding class, college level calculus, was extraordinarily popular. Why? The charisma of Escalante himself seems to have played a major role: it was seen as a cool class to take. "What they liked about Escalante's class was the spirit of camaraderie, the jokes, the pep talks about the AP, and especially the warm-ups." There was a musical warm-up, Queen's We are the Champions! Many of the mathematical ideas were dressed up in his own little jokes, language: "She gritted her teeth every time she missed a negative sign lurking outside a function. The secret agent, Escalante called it." I'm sure every good Maths teacher does something like this, has their own way of talking about things that the students get sucked into. But I also think it's something very personal to the teacher. Getting every teacher to call a minus sign outside a bracket, "the secret agent" wouldn't work. Perhaps that's what the author meant by the comment about the best ideas from Garfield turning rancid "if they had first been cooked in a school board committee and reduced to short numbered paragraphs." But that's a difficult lesson for organisations because it puts far too much emphasis on the character of the teacher, on personal attributes that are difficult to pin down. It shifts the balance of power from the organisation to the individual worker. It makes it harder for the organisation to treat all workers as interchangeable, disposable.

Mr Escalante was working in a high school. The young people he met were obliged by the state to attend. They had limited life experience. Adult students have all chosen to attend the course. They have status in their own lives, careers, communities. One is practising andragogy and the accommodation between students and teacher works differently. "Escalante felt he needed money to motivate. It was something these kids understood." Adults have already worked out, to some extent, why they are in the class although they may need help seeing how some aspect of Mathematics is relevant to their future studies on an Accountancy or Psychology degree - I took some trouble in that respect. We'll talk elsewhere about situated cognition.

So, for me as a teacher primarily of adults, this was a really interesting book, one with lessons certainly but also one that threw aspects of my own adult teaching into sharper relief. There's lots more to think about and say but that will be elsewhere.