Former student of Jaime Escalante turns out okay

January 21, 2004

We first were introduced to Jay Mathews by reading his book on Jaime Escalante, the East L.A. high school calculus teacher who inspired the movie Stand and Deliver.

Mr. Mathews' latest Washington Post column catches up with one of Escalante's former students.

One of the many things I envy about teachers is the joy they feel when students come back to tell them how grateful they are for what they were taught. Journalists like me don't get visits like that, but I received an e-mail last week that was almost as good.

It came from Greg Rusu, whom I met 18 years ago when he was a senior at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. He was one of the many students of Jaime Escalante, the soon-to-be-famous math teacher I was writing a book about. I was very impressed with Rusu, but soon lost track of him.

Mr. Mathews speaks of the efforts of Garfield's staffers to prevent Rusu from taking Escalante's course:

Many Garfield administrators did not like Escalante. They thought he worked his students too hard to pass the AP tests. They feared that all the fragile adolescents from immigrant families, mostly Mexican, that made up the Garfield student body would burn up and drop out.

The words from one administrator are especially harsh:

The magnet program director told Rusu: "Don't try to grow up too fast. If you invest all that time, you're going to flunk all your other classes. Your grade-point average will go down. Nobody's gonna give you scholarships. Your parents are going to get mad."

Rusu took calculus anyway, getting the top score on the AP exam his junior year and again the top score on the advanced calculus AP exam his senior year.

Emphasis ours. Alas, in college, the real world intervened and Rusu's engineering plans got sidetracked, much as ours were. He's now quite successful in the computer industry, and has his sights set even further.

His story does reinforce our strong belief that education is meant to open doors for our children, the more, the merrier.

Students, as young adults, will chose their own doorways, which makes life so interesting.