Teachers play important roles in the lives of their students. Wearing many hats, they do far more than present a lesson. Over the course of the day a teacher may play the role of educator, ally, confidante, disciplinarian, protector, health expert, counselor or advocate. The teacher who can successfully navigate these roles with passion and high expectations while taking a personal interest in their students sets the stage for a learning environment that allows the teacher to guide or mentor their students. The role of mentor goes beyond teaching a subject, they teach life skills and lessons while inspiring their students to reach for more than they thought they were capable of. The role of a mentor is the most important role a teacher can play in the lives of their students and Mr. Escalante and Ms. Watson are excellent examples of great mentors.
Great teachers are passionate about teaching; they teach because they want to teach. Though we are not explicitly told why Mr. Escalante chose to teach, we can assume that it was a choice that he made because he had passion to do so. Early in the movie, Mr. Escalante is taking the garbage out to the curbside and while there he visits with a neighbor. The neighbor is surprised to hear that Mr. Escalante is now teaching and surmises that Mr Escalante must have gotten laid off instead of this career change being a choice that he has made. This passion spills over onto his students as he works to draw out their ganas or desire. He says to them, “You already have two strikes against you. There are some people in this world who will assume that you know less than you do, because of your name and your complexion. But math is the great equalizer… You’re gonna work harder than you ever worked before. And the only thing I ask from you is ganas.” By checking in with them about their ganas he was creating an atmosphere where everyone was ready and wanting to learn.
Likewise, Ms. Watson taught because she had a passion for teaching. In the opening voiceover we learn that Katherine Watson had “all her life, wanted to teach at Wellesley College. So, when a position opened in the Art History department, she pursued it single-mindedly until she was hired.” Ms. Watson came to Wellesley because it was the top women’s college in the nation, she wanted to be apart of an institution that turned out tomorrow’s leaders. She came to Wellesley because she wanted to make a difference. However, her first day was a disaster. She introduces herself and the syllabus that she will be following. As she begins to show the slides the girls one by one call out the name of the piece and it’s importance without having been called upon by Ms. Watson. In other words, they took over the class. The girls had already read the required reading and memorized the information because they were in the habit of regurgitating information. The following day she comes back to class with a whole new plan. She introduces art work that is not on the syllabus and asks the girls to look at the piece and consider it without knowing anything about it. In this way she regains control and begins to teach them to think for themselves. She asks them to “look beyond the paint” and “let us try to open our minds to a new idea”. At first the girls are frustrated by this and are not really sure of what she is asking of them, but as the year wears on they begin to dig in and consider things that they had not consider before. By the end of the year they are having meaty discussions about art and what they think. As word gets out about Ms. Watson and her class, interest is generated and a demand develops for her class the following year.
Mr. Escalante and Ms. Watson both have high expectations of their students, yet their expectations are in conflict with the expectations of the schools where they teach and the student’s parents. Mr Escalante teaches at a barrio school in East Los Angeles where the students are not expected to be high academic performers. It seems that the only expectations for the students is that they would finish high school and go on to get a service type job. It is quite shocking for them to have a teacher like Mr. Escalante who sets up the structure of the class and makes it clear that if you come to class, you come prepared and you participate; no exceptions. By establishing this type of structure in the class, the students begin to learn and develop confidence. On a field trip he takes his students to some type of plant where his neighbor works, there are computers everywhere and the kids are enthusiastic. There he learns that his neighbor’s daughter is using a computer program at her school to learn calculus, which gives him the idea to teach calculus to his students. When he lets the head of the math department know his intentions, she objects because she thinks that he is creating a situation where the students will only be disappointed and their hard work will be for naught. His response is that “they will rise to the level of expectation”. He figures out a schedule that if followed will bring the students to the level they would need to be at to take the AP calculus exam. His doing so creates tension amongst himself and the faculty. This also challenges the expectations of the students parents. One girl’s mother questions why she would do this because, after all, “boys don’t like you if you are too smart”.
Ms. Watson’s expectations for the girls also collided with those of the faculty and the students’ parents. Wellesley was a college that accepted only the brightest young women in the nation and had very strong sense of tradition that connected the current students to those had gone to Wellesley before. This was a very elite group of women. Yet, these traditions came with a cost.The cost of fitting into those traditions is to squelch your own sense of creativity and uniqueness in order to fit into roles that have previously been set and expectations that have nothing to do with your own hopes and dreams. Joan’s editorial of Ms. Watson made it very clear that by challenging the girls to look beyond and consider something new, she was “disregarding the roles they (the girls) were born to fulfill”. In this case these roles were to marry and be housewives versus to further their own educations and have careers of their own. It is in this tension of tradition and expectation that Ms. Watson led by example, proving herself a great educator and mentor who was true to herself and compelled others to look beyond: “To seek truth beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image”. In this way she made the difference that she had sought to make when she arrived at Wellesley.
Taking a personal interest in their students and the people they are, both Mr. Escalante and Ms. Watson which helps create a relationship of trust. When Mr. Escalante learns that one of his brightest students, Anna, will be dropping out of school to work in her families’ restaurant, he goes to the restaurant and petitions her father to allow her to stay. Mr. Escalante convinces him that Anna is smart and that after completing high school and going to college she will be of greater help to him than any work that she could do for him at this time. In the end, Anna received a 4 on the AP calculus exam and was making plans to go to college, the first person in her family to do so. Similarly, Ms. Watson goes the extra mile when she learns that Joan is interested in going to Yale Law school by getting her an application and helping her to fill it out. Though Joan was accepted, she chose not to go, but to marry instead. Yet knowing that Ms. Watson believed in her and giving her the courage to apply to Yale meant a great deal to her. Even though she still chose to take the path that had been laid out for her, she closely looked at and considered another option before making her final decision, something that she would not have done had it not been for Ms. Watson.
Mr. Escalante and Ms. Watson are two teachers who are excellent of examples of the most important role that teachers play in the lives of the their students; the role of mentor. Both teachers have passion, high expectations of themselves and the students as well as a willingness to be personally involved in the lives of their students. More than just teaching a particular subject, teachers who are mentors teach their students about life and challenge them to be the best they can be.
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