McFarland Vs Escalante

While the subject matter was different, both Mr McFarland from Mike Rose’s I Just Want to be Normal and Mr Escalante from the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver would challenge their students and be a catalyst in trying to elevate their students from what would have otherwise been a sub-par educational experience. Both of these teachers showed enough of an interest in their students that they realized that they were capable of more than they had been allotted and challenged them to rail against the labels placed on them.
In Stand and Deliver Mr. Escalante pushed the students with enough drive to accomplish something truly amazing in their Calculus Advanced Placement tests. As he was depicted in the movie Mr. Escalante was a stickler for rules and required all of the students to meet his high expectations for success or get out of the way of the other students. While he did make exceptions on several occasions for the character of Angel he made his disappointment in the character known. He would do the same thing with most of his students at one point or another, push them to some form of breaking point and then pull them back into the fold. With Ana and the confrontation with her father at the restaurant, the scene in the car with ____ where he points out that he only sees the path in front of him, not the consequences of taking each path.
It is a little harder to delve the character of Mr McFarland from I Just Want to be Normal because we are only given two and a half pages of brief information about the authors interaction with him. From this we also saw that he recognized a student that was underperforming and showed enough interest to ferret out the fact that he had been mis-categorized in the Vocational Track. After removing Rose from that track he helped him to succeed in spite of the handicap that had been placed on him by the years in the other program.

Both teachers showed an interest in their students and a desire to see them grow in spite of the rather low expectations set on them by circumstances mostly outside of the student’s control. By doing this one can infer, or hope, that their efforts helped these students out of the path they were on and onto one that would lead to a happier life.