Stand and Deliver notes part 1

Stand and Deliver

town is poor
school is poor
nobody cares about class
non english speaking kids move to front
kids kinda threaten teacher
fight outside school
school could lose accreditation
teacher says he could do more
one kid asks for more books so he doesn't get seem carrying them around
each student is shown at home working
students start to care about class
one kid refuses to do test and is sat at front of classroom until she does
one kids father makes her work in restaurant
teacher goes to restaurant and talks to father
kid comes back
decides he'll teach calculus
has kids get paper signed saying they'll show up early and stay late
one kid didn't get it signed "you only see the turn not the road ahead"
one girl gets tired of it and tries to leave
one kid says he's too dumb for calculus
Angel is told to leave because he showed up late, his grandmother is sick
Escalante started visiting a junior high
Angel brought his grandmother to Escalante's place on Christmas
Escalante was teaching adults for free at night
he has a heart attack, music teacher is substitite
Escalante is told he shouldn't do anything work related for a month but shows up anyway

What Makes a Good Teacher

Good teaching gives freedom. Students need to be able to approach tasks or provide solutions in their own way, so that they have the ability to pick a method that interests them, or one that is easier and more efficient. Either way they will have to think about their process and result themselves, committing it to learned memory. Teachers should be available to provide suggestions or support, or to clarify the requirements should a student become confused or on the wrong track, but by not enforcing a specific method the teachers are not causing the students to become best suited to repetition and memorization. Repetition and memorization is the source of disinterest and frustration. There are clearly times when it cannot be avoided, what I mean is that there should never be repetition for repetition sake, and there are often plenty of alternative ways to learn just about anything. Traditional ways are time efficient and easy to conduct, making them very popular. A good teacher is one willing to do something slightly unusual or more difficult for the sake of the teaching quality.

copypasta

Three scenes of good teaching (group)
Mr. Escalante shows examples of being a good / bad  teacher in the following scenes

SCENE 1- Bad Yet Good Teaching. (Andrew)
This scene took place on school grounds not in the classroom, the leader of the group was in a fight and not winning, Angel sees this fight and runs out to join and back his friend up. While on his way out to help his friend Jaime grabs him and holds him back with struggle coming from angel trying to break free. Jaime then proceeds to tell the students to go get help and grab another teacher. Escalante breaks the rules of the educational system by intervening in the fight going against teacher code, yet shows his good teaching by helping Angel not get involved in any trouble. You can really tell he wants the best from his students in this scene, basically showing and letting Angel know that he can do better than to stoop to that level.

SCENE 2-Word Problems, Good Teaching. (Annika)
This scene took place in the classroom, Jaime asks the class to read the board aloud getting students to participate. The word problem uses students names and how many girlfriends they have making fun of them for more student interactions. As soon as the class started reading aloud the principle and another teacher enter the room, Angel had followed in as well and the class as a whole says, "laaaaaatteeee, late" Escalante tells them to calm down and try to solve the problem on the board asking multiple people to step up and speak out, 99% of the students didn't answer it correctly until Ana walks in the door and explains what the words on the board were trying to say and answers the word problem correctly. As soon as she walked in Jaime smiled and said, "Glad to have you back" and then proceeds to tell the class how it's not that they're stupid, but they don't know how to learn it yet. This shows good teaching in that it gives students a new challenge with personal connection.

SCENE 3- Apple Scene. Good Teaching (Megan)
This scene took place in the classroom , the whole class was in their seats and they are making fun of Mr. Escalante having a chef apron and hat on. He holds up his butcher knife and an apple and slams it down on the cutting board getting the whole classes attention. He then walks around putting different slices and parts of the apples on each students desk and asked them what they had. Some answered with joking answers saying that they have a "core" and an "apple" and others answered with fractions, Ana answered with a percentage, trying to get the class to engage in what percent or fraction of the apple that they have. This is good teaching in that he actively participated in the class activity and got the class to participate as well, he really tries to get his students to engage and see that math really isn't that hard if you think about it, it just comes to you.

Final Draft

In middle school I didn't care very much, and as a result I didn't didn't do very well. It's hard enough to try to get yourself motivated to participate in a busywork contest orchestrated by a staff stripped of personality and effort, but it's worse when compounded with a massive disconnect between the cause and effect of success and failure. At that level of education the entrants to higher level classes are picked almost arbitrarily, and the school is more concerned about moving students along regardless if they fail. Before it starts to sound like I'm trying to justify my own failure I should clarify that these observations are retrospective, and that at the time I figured I was just lazy, but the issue affected almost everyone. My own and others' occasional doubts were lost to the staff actually telling us "middle school doesn't really matter", and we were consoled by the thought that one day we could flip a switch and succeed once it matters. This, of course, is much easier said than done.

At the time I had a fair number of friends, and we'd always sit at the same place during lunch and all that. They were the sort of people who were brilliant at one or two things and were known for it. They weren't idiot savants, though, because they were also just generally smart. A couple almost perfectly fit the nerd stereotype, and almost off of them were of the opinion that focusing on whatever their hobby was would be more beneficial in the long run than doing schoolwork. This actually proved true for one friend who focused on programming and ended up completing almost a dozen playable games and several calculator applications by the end of high school. He didn't have great grades, but he still went somewhere with a hefty scholarship. From what I've since heard a lot of those people ended up benefiting from their hobby to some degree. The important distinction is that I wasn't particularly good at anything, and I didn't have many hobbies. Unlike them there wasn't at least one class that could benefit from my own enjoyment of the subject, and unlike everyone else I hadn't managed to have enough sense to actually do any of the work despite how dull and repetitive it was. Even people who hated the work more than I did at least got some of it done. So at the end of eighth grade I was told I was going to summer school.

I hadn't thought about summer school since I was quite young, and the last I thought of it was similar to that of a daycare type service, but I knew that anyone going to summer school at my age has seriously messed up. I can't remember being surprised based on my grades, though. The first day was strange, to say the least.  The room was full of kids who seemed uncontrollable or willfully ignorant. While writing this I spent a while trying to think of the best way to put it, but's essentially how it was. The willfully ignorant simply refused to do work, and the uncontrollable either seemed to care less than I did, stacked with extroversion, or just had short attention spans and were loud. A group of young adults sat in the back watching us all day every day, and according to our teacher it was for their own instructional purposes as they were going to be teachers themselves. Worksheets is what we worked on mostly, and I remember thinking it was a joke at first, simply doing one worksheet after another on various subjects. Algebra, reading comprehension, brief random history texts. Sitting in a classroom with a mound of work you can't take home and being watched by almost 20 soon-to-be teachers is very unnerving, and a great incentive to try to work on some of it. Having at least attended constantly for the last couple years I knew the content, so the work itself wasn't hard. I remembered my math teacher telling me I was smart but lazy while I plowed through the pages and pages of work, thinking "Not so lazy now".

I think the most important single moment was looking up from the efficiency spree expecting to grab another few pages of something to work on and not seeing anything. Paging through everything I had already done and looking around to see if other people were working on something I hadn't received, and realizing that I finished more work in one sitting than as long as I could remember, and it wasn't even that difficult. The sense of accomplishment was great, and I almost wanted more work. I know if I had the option to do all the work at once for the whole class instead of finishing 2 hours early every day I would have, but instead each day I'd either revise my work until perfection or mess around on the only computer in the room.

This went on for several weeks. Every day I'd fly through the work, connect the dots in our reading, state definitions like a dictionary, understand the math and have an answer without writing anything down, and it all felt good. Not everything lasts forever, though, and eventually my position as star pupil came to an end. The work was never too hard in the first place, so overcoming difficulty wasn't the major accomplishment, but the fact that I had started and finished. Having experienced this was instrumental in overcoming my next major challenge, going to West Sound Academy. The school was an arts school converted to college preparation, and considering the work was already a grade ahead of public school level it was going to be very difficult. Once it started I was determined to maintain the feeling of success and accomplishment of completing work, but the workload and difficulty was so great and foreign it was quite a struggle. By the time I managed to catch up and succeed I had already left a trail of barely adequate grades, deeming me unacceptable for most colleges, but having experienced and desired success to the point of recovering a years worth of material in a stressful environment I knew I was ready for whatever was next. It's funny how something designed to catch up the uninterested students to keep them progressing in grade levels taught me work ethic.

In middle school I didn't care very much, and as a result I didn't didn't do very well. It's hard enough to try to get yourself motivated to participate in a busywork contest orchestrated by a staff stripped of personality and effort, but it's worse when compounded with a massive disconnect between the cause and effect of success and failure. At that level of education the entrants to higher level classes are picked almost arbitrarily, and the school is more concerned about moving students along regardless if they fail. Before it starts to sound like I'm trying to justify my own failure I should clarify that these observations are retrospective, and that at the time I figured I was just lazy, but the issue affected almost everyone. My own and others' occasional doubts were lost to the staff actually telling us "middle school doesn't really matter", and we were consoled by the thought that one day we could flip a switch and succeed once it matters. This, of course, is much easier said than done.

At the time I had a fair number of friends, and we'd always sit at the same place during lunch and all that. They were the sort of people who were brilliant at one or two things and were known for it. They weren't idiot savants, though, because they were also just generally smart. Almost off of them were of the opinion that focusing on whatever their hobby was would be more beneficial in the long run than doing schoolwork. This actually proved true for one friend who focused on programming and ended up completing almost a dozen playable games and several calculator applications by the end of high school. He didn't have great grades, but he still went somewhere with a hefty scholarship. From what I've since heard a lot of those people ended up benefiting from their hobby to some degree. The important distinction is that I wasn't particularly good at anything, and I didn't have many hobbies. Unlike them there wasn't at least one class that could benefit from my own enjoyment of the subject, and unlike everyone else I hadn't managed to have enough sense to actually do any of the work despite how dull and repetitive it was. Even people who hated the work more than I did at least got some of it done. So at the end of eighth grade I was told I was going to summer school.

The first day was strange, to say the least.  The room was full of kids who seemed uncontrollable or willfully ignorant. While writing this I spent a while trying to think of the best way to put it, but's essentially how it was. The willfully ignorant simply refused to do work, and the uncontrollable either seemed to care less than I did, stacked with extroversion, or just had short attention spans and were loud. A group of young adults sat in the back watching us all day every day, and according to our teacher it was for their own instructional purposes as they were going to be teachers themselves. Worksheets is what we worked on mostly, and I remember thinking it was a joke at first, simply doing one worksheet after another on various subjects. Algebra, reading comprehension, brief random history texts. Sitting in a classroom with a mound of work you can't take home and being watched by almost 20 soon-to-be teachers is very unnerving, and a great incentive to try to work on some of it. Having at least attended constantly for the last couple years I knew the content, so the work itself wasn't hard. I remembered my math teacher telling me I was smart but lazy while I plowed through the pages and pages of work, thinking "Not so lazy now". I think the most important single moment was looking up from the efficiency spree expecting to grab another few pages of something to work on and not seeing anything. Paging through everything I had already done and looking around to see if other people were working on something I hadn't received, and realizing that I finished more work in one sitting than as long as I could remember, and it wasn't even that difficult. The sense of accomplishment was great, and I almost wanted more work. I know if I had the option to do all the work at once for the whole class instead of finishing 2 hours early every day I would have, but instead each day I'd either revise my work until perfection or mess around on the only computer in the room.

The most important thing I ever learned... I have no idea. It's hard to think about your entire life and everything you've ever learned and pick one thing to be most important. Realistically it's probably something like "the world doesn't revolve around me" or "other people are real people too" or something else most people learn as toddlers in today's society. If I had to choose something that's both moderately important, and that I can write some sort of experience about, it's probably got something to do with making friends. Nothing specific, like how or why to do it, but just that the whole activity is generally a good thing.

There are so many ways people make connections with other people, like clinging to specific people and finding additions by chance, being excessively outgoing and forming hundreds of half-baked interactions, or even just being quiet and alone and coming across other quiet and alone people. However it happens, friends are important things to make and keep. As some famous ancient philosopher whose name I don't remember once said, "To live alone one must be a beast or a god", and considering how few people actually happily solo life it must be true.

Mike Rose's "I Just Want to be Average" And Malcolm X's "Learning to Read" are surprisingly similar. In both, they were put in institutions where the occupants were looked down upon, or considered to be inferior. Where they begin to differ is that Mike Rose was a capable student put in an environment where students and teachers showed little care, and Malcolm entered prison as an equal to the other inmates in an environment where the faculty attempts by inmates to learn. Returning to how thy're similar, both found strong interest in a certain activity, learning for one and reading for the other, and eventually moved on to continue exploration of their interests. I think I'll probably use a style of writing similar to theirs in the first paper, since I'm beginning to strongly consider a learning story that follows a similar course.