Fun, Ganas & Preparation: Attributes of Inspiring Teachers

Jaime Escalante  is one of the most extraordinary and celebrated teachers of our times.  Millions have been inspired by the film, Stand and Deliver, where his dedication and innovative teaching techniques are shown to help the most disadvantaged students achieve the most astonishing results.  

I suspect there are few teachers who can look back on their lives in the classroom with greater satisfaction. Here are three lessons that Escalante’s journey illustrates with particular power:   

1. Have fun and forge a team.

In 1952, Escalante began teaching mathematics and physics at high schools in La Paz, Bolivia.  Here, Escalante discovered that learning and joy go hand in hand, an enduring truth that ponderous pedants and pompous presenters (“all protocol observed”), ignore at their peril. As Escalante tells it:

I found early in my career that children learn faster when learning is fun, when it is a game and a challenge.  From the beginning, I cast the teacher in the role of the “coach” and the students in the role of the “team”.  I made sure they knew that we were all working together. 

Escalante would often use terms from sports, to create a sense of action, camaraderie and competition among the students.  He referred to final exams as the “Olympics”; he’d take the basketball term “three-point shot” to mean a parabola and “illegal defence” to remind students that zero cannot be a divisor. “I use toys, tell lots of jokes, and let the kids participate.   A teacher must enjoy his or her work and convey that joy to the students.”

Escalante’s idea of coaching synergistic teams, fuelled by regular doses of fun, is not restricted to education. Another of the world’s foremost teachers, whose subject is entrepreneurship, is Virgin’s CEO, Sir Richard Branson.  Branson imbues his Virgin workplace teams with a  “fun-loving attitude” which, he says, “makes a tremendous difference to our business.” 

2. Instil “ganas”, because it’s not all fun and games.

Escalante achieved fame only after he left Bolivia – where he had been carefully watched, apprenticed and critiqued by an experienced teacher -- to pursue greater opportunities in the United States in the 1960s.  But Escalante was not qualified to teach in the States.  He had to learn English and then study for a further degree by taking night courses, all this just to get a job in an American classroom. 

When he finally earned his chance in 1974, it was to teach basic mathematics at the run-down Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, California, with its triple threat of gangs, violence and drugs.   

Escalante was appalled at his students’ lack of preparation for the mathematics he intended teaching them.  They appeared to be marking time before embarking on lives of grinding inner-city poverty. He was briefly tempted to believe -- what some had warned him about  -- that these students were “unteachable”.  In fact, after just two hours of exposure to this bleak reality, Escalante called his former boss at a computer factory and asked for his job back.   

Fortunately -- for his students and teachers everywhere -- Escalante never did go back to his old day job.  Instead, he got to work.   He challenged his students to bring just one thing to his class: ganas, by which he meant “desire” or the “wish to succeed”.  “You must bring ganas every day,” he’d say, but he also accepted that it was the teacher’s job “to bring out the ganas in each student.”  With the right teacher in the classroom, a “fire in the belly” can be taught just as surely as mathematics.

While we’re on the subject of ganas, it’s worth noting the efforts of a stubborn teacher and determined mother, Ann Dunham. Under her relentless, ganas-instilling care, her son, now President Barack Obama, gained a formidable vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Obama recalls:

When I was a child my mother and I lived overseas, and she didn't have the money to send me to the fancy international school where all the American kids went to school. So what she did was she supplemented my schooling with lessons from a correspondence course. And I can still picture her waking me up at 4:30 a.m., five days a week, to go over some lessons before I went to school. And whenever I'd complain and grumble and find some excuse and say, "Awww, I'm sleepy," she'd patiently repeat to me her most powerful defense. She'd say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

Escalante was acutely aware of the “no picnic” qualities of his Garfield High charges. But he knew a secret that would help his students reach their most ambitious dreams. 

3.  Extraordinary Results Require Extraordinary Preparation.

To read Escalante’s words here is to enter the realm of a meticulous master of his craft:

My preparation for my classes is intense and I must maintain a high level of organization to back it up.  I have a row of file cabinets filled with color-coded sections.  Every lesson plan for each day of the year is filed in sequence; every subject is covered.  I prepare each quiz, homework assignment and practice session before the school year even begins, so I save a great deal of time during the year.  This allows me to spend time and energy working out a more important problem: exactly how to present a particular concept and spark interest, considering the personalities and preparation of my students and the chemistry of a particular class.

Most CEOs and political leaders, let alone teachers, would rightly stand in awe of Escalante’s willpower and foresight when it comes to preparing for his work.  Which leads me to two questions:

1. What would be the impact on Botswana if our business leaders attended to their customers’ needs with Escalante’s level of care?

2. More important, how might Botswana’s future be transformed if every school in the country had just one teacher striving to reach the level of a Jaime Escalante?

… 

In Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More is approached by an able young man, Richard Rich, who is hell-bent on getting a job at King Henry VIII’s court.  Sir Thomas More has other ideas:

More:  Why not be a teacher? You'd be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one.
Rich:  If I was, who would know it?
More:  You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that.

Jaime Escalante currently lives in Bolivia where, with his pupils’ esteem and his friends’ love sustaining him, and with God willing, he will celebrate his 79th birthday on December 31, 2009.  Not a bad public, that, and a splendid life from which any individual or nation might learn.  

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org