I used to watch South Park on Comedy Central, but after a certain point, decided I didn’t care for it. Too often the show would make one disgusting or at least unfunny joke and keep repeating it over and over again. Anyway, one episode had Cartman teaching inner city kids math, sort of. He shaved part of his head, gave himself a bad combover, and spoke in an exaggerated Spanish accent while espousing the only way for his students to win was to cheat. And he would shout about how important cheating was many times over and see what I said about repeating jokes. I vaguely knew the joke was a reference to the movie Stand and Deliver, but I hadn’t seen it.
Until recently that is.
New teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) arrives at his new job teaching at James Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, only to discover the computer teaching job he thought he had is actually a math position because, well, this school can’t afford computers. Jaime, with his thick accent, bad combover, and old car, gave up a job with computers because he wanted to be a teacher. This was not the job he thought he was signing up for, but he went for it anyway. He got a class full of largely apathetic kids from the neighborhood, and even though most of them barely care for anything he has to say, he throws himself into his work and teaches them algebra and calculus by, in part, relating the ideas to concepts they already know. Over time, he wins over the trust of his low-performing students and gets them to take the Advanced Placement Calculus test for college credit. And that’s not the end of the movie! Arguably, that was the halfway point. Jaime is the sort of teacher who really cares for his students, even smuggling math problems out of his hospital room to help them learn.
Now, truth be told, most movies about dedicated educators are all more or less the same. A new teacher shows up with some different approach or idea, and he wins over his students enough to get them to really learn. Even when the movie is, like Stand and Deliver, based on a true story, that doesn’t make the basic formula for these movies any less cliched. Many times these movies can be carried by the strength of the lead actor’s performance as the teacher. Fortunately, Olmos really does a bang-up job, to the point where it isn’t that hard to see why the students hang on his every word even if he uses a bit of mockery in the classroom. Sure, the teacher going to talk to parents who aren’t supportive enough isn’t a new thing for a movie, but Olmos sells it well.
But then the movie takes a turn in the last act as, despite the fact the students who took the test all passed it with a 3 or better (for the uninitiated, AP tests score on a scale of 1-5 with a 4 or 5 being a guaranteed passing grade and a 3 potentially acceptable depending on the college, and, in the interests of full disclosure, I took three AP tests in my own senior year of high school, earning a 3 in English and Calculus and a 4 in Biology, but my college only gave me credit for that 4 which is why I haven’t taken a science class since high school), the testing company suspects foul play because why else would a bunch of kids from a poor inner city school all do so well? This means there’s a sudden shift to the narrative as the kids have to perhaps take a new test to prove they didn’t cheat and Jaime spends equal time either prepping them all over again for a more difficult test or outright defending them against the test company’s investigators.
This was a wonderful film. Olmos really carried it. And that’s all there is to it.
Grade: A
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