Stand and Deliver
“There will be no free rides, no excuses. You already have two strikes against you: your name and your complexion. Because of these two strikes, there are some people in this world who will assume that you know less than you do. Math is the great equalizer... When you go for a job, the person giving you that job will not want to hear your problems; ergo, neither do I. You're going to work harder here than you've ever worked anywhere else. And the only thing I ask from you is ganas. Desire.” Ramon Menendez (Stand and Deliver)
Stand and Deliver, a 1988 film directed by Ramon Menendez follows the true story of how teacher Jaime Escalante, played by Edward Olmos in his Oscar nominated role, takes a group of poverty stricken students in a run down school and defies the odds by not only getting them to learn but want to learn. Throughout the whole movie is the proof that being underprivileged does not mean less intelligent, Stand and Deliver shows that with hard work, the proper push, and desire, anything can be accomplished.
The film begins with a new teacher, Jaime Escalante, arriving to Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. On his first day he comes to find out that the computer science class he thought he was going to teach doesn't exist, because the school has no computers. In turn he is assigned to take over the general algebra class. From the beginning the film portrays the school as one on its downfall, and with students that are facing poverty. The class he receives is full of students who, according to other teachers at the school, are unintelligent and incapable of learning much of the material. Students cannot be expected to learn material when the teachers themselves do not believe in the stude...
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...out the idea of equal opportunity, and that no matter what, anyone can accomplish what they put their mind to.
The film Stand and Deliver gives us a true story of hard work and perseverance. The kids in this movie prove everyone wrong when they buckle down, give up their Saturdays, their summers, and in turn their fun as high school seniors, and learn what no one but Mr. Escalante believed that they could. While some like Henry Giroux and Robert Scholes seem to just see the negatives and the deceiving from video texts, as can be seen in Stand and Deliver there is still a belief in portraying proper morals in the world. Mr. Escalante teaches not only his kids, but those watching the movie, that it does not matter where your from, success is measured through hard work and your desire to get it done. If you have those things anything can be accomplished.
The film starts with an uprising after a white storeowner kills a black teenager. This incident Highlights Prejudices. The teenager was labeled a thief because of the color of his skin and the unjustifiable murder causes racial tensions that exist as a result of the integration of the high schools.
Although the U.S. Constitution states that “all men are created equal,” during America’s early days it only applied to upper class white men. This upsets many people in the United States. When the Constitution first came into play, only the rich white men were treated right. As the years progressed, more and more whites
America has forever long been looked upon as the land of opportunity, yet for just as long struggled with the actual attainment of equal opportunity by all of its citizens. The lines of this inequality have b...
“I viewed each of the films at least once…taking notes on the role of the teacher, peer relations, among students, relations between students and adults, student attitudes toward schoolwork, extracurricular activities, the role of the family, the resources of the school, the use of violence and drugs, exploitation of sexuality (4).”
In his autobiographical essay, “Workers”, Richard Rodriguez tells about a summer in which he gets a job at a construction site in order to show that not all construction workers are poor and uneducated. Toward the conclusion of his essay, he explains that your skin color does not give people the right to judge others based on their skin color or their occupation selection. The speaker makes an obvious case people should not judge a book by its cover while also implying that skin tone should mean nothing.
Stand and Deliver is film about a mathematics teacher named Jaime Escalante in a low-class hispanic neighborhood. Convinced that his students have potential, he does everything he can to help his class pass the AP calculus exam. Once the exams scores are released, the proctors accuse the class of cheating because of their unusually high grades for their demographic. The acting of this movie is very convincing (though the cast of high school students do not look like high school students) as Mr. Escalante struggles to balance his burdens. There is a scene in the movie where Mr. Escalante is so stressed to the point where he has a heart attack. At this point the students realise all the sacrifices he had to make for the students to succeed and they get their act together to study diligently for the AP exam. The scenery accurately conveys the low class slums of Los Angeles, with dirty and dusty car auto shops and the rundown highschool that most of the movie takes place in. The scenery also showed the culture of the setting, where there was a scene that takes place in a
can take new roles as equal citizens in a newly formed society. Booker T. Washington sees the
The film follows the stories of Anthony, Bianca, Daisy, Emily, and Francisco as their family’s attempt to improve the quality of their education. It was assumed
In 1964, Linda Brown along with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) challenged the Separate but Equal doctrine, and won (Askew). Discriminatory laws that lasted for 99 years, starting with the Black Codes, moving to the Louisiana Separate Car Act and Plessy v. Ferguson, to everyday laws, finally became overturned. They permanently hindered a large group of people as seen by literacy rates, household income, and household ownership, but those numbers became more equal as time went on. Unfortunately, due to humanities extreme ignorance, we don’t see these issues recurring today. People discriminate against homosexuals, for example, and they don’t get equal rights. People must look to the past and use the knowledge of their mistakes to never make those same mistakes again.
Once you arrive, however, your optimism turns into a living nightmare. Your daughter comes home from elementary school crying because somebody called her a “wetback”. Then your son comes home from middle school with a black eye because he was jumped by a group of white guys who said they did not like “spics”. This not only horrifies you as a parent but astonishes you at the same time, because you come from a diverse place in which your siblings were not told racial slurs or woefully stereotyped as illegal aliens. You can not stop thinking about your kids’ first day at school, but you know you must pull yourself together and go to work.
The goal should have been to promote and ensure equality of opportunity for people regardless of
... equal opportunity before the law and in society, but his idea was equal opportunity to succeed. He felt “it [was] the exceptional people who improved society” (Labin). Harrison Bergeron is his frightening caricature of what society would become if people continue with the absurd equalization ideas of the sixties.
Diversity, equality and fairness are the latest buzzwords being kicked around in academia and the media. Everybody is supposed to achieve the American Dream today, regardless of who you are, where you came from, or what you do to get there. According to their math, equality of opportunity equals equality of outcome, and if it doesn't, rig the formula so it does.
My first year of junior high, (in our school that was seventh grade) I was not spending all my time trying to be popular like all the other people in my grade. I was just being me how I always had been. One day at I was sitting at the lunch table with a bunch of people I would hang around with sometimes. Some of them were talking about there weekends.
Non judgmental and Compassion was a message in this movie. If more people would have compassion for others we would live in a better world. It is important to be non judgmental because people never know what happens in a person's life to cause them to act out in a certain way. Mrs. Erin Gruwell’s students were separated along racial lines and had few aspirations beyond street survival. Many people warned her that her students were all criminals who couldn’t be taught. With all odds stacked against her, she accepted the teaching position at Wilson High School. Erin Gruwell saw more in the students than a future as criminals and gang members; she saw them as people who have lost their ways in life. Instead of turning her back as society had done, she held out a helping hand. She had compassion and was non judgmental toward the children’s actions and hatred for one another. Being judgmental...