Like Jaime Escalante, the subject of the 1988 film Stand and Deliver who died this week at age 79, I teach AP Calculus AB, the course that many believe is the most challenging course in the standard U.S. high school curriculum.

Like Escalante, I teach that course in an open-enrollment environment, meaning no student at my school is denied the chance to take AP Calculus just because someone else believes that he or she has little chance of succeeding.

“Like Escalante…”

I wish I could begin many more sentences with those two words. But on too many school days, the similarities end with the ones already stated. On too many days, I’m less like Jaime Escalante and more like Richard Vernon, the teacher character/caricature from the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club who’s decided that it’s easier to acquiesce to the “us-against-them” model of teacher-student relations than to get his hands dirty trying to make a difference.

Is our educational system broken? Sure. Is it getting better? Probably not. Are the goals of 100 percent proficiency that were signed into law in 2002 via No Child Left Behind unreasonably utopian, and do they encourage states and districts to lower standards, distort priorities, and even make false claims of progress? Likely. Does NCLB unfairly marginalize children who excel in subjects other than the core ones that are subject to high-stakes testing? I think so.

Do my colleagues and I content ourselves with griping about all of this, instead of making it our business to impact the right-here-right-now-on-this-day lives of the students sitting in our classrooms today? On this day?

Too often, yes.

Much has been written about Jaime Escalante’s celebration of ganas, a Spanish word that roughly means “desire” or the urge to succeed. Storybook stuff– until the cynics (including your own inner cynic) point out that Escalante technically didn’t “give” his students ganas: it was already there, and he just brought it out. Throw a student with no inner ganas into AP Calculus (or ninth-grade geometry, for that matter), and there’s simply nothing the teacher can do. You can’t bring out what’s not already in there, they’d argue.

Thankfully, Jaime Escalante never bothered himself with these mental exercises. He simply assumed that every kid who walked into his class did indeed have ganas sleeping inside. And, much more often than the Mr. Vernons of the teaching profession would care to admit, he was right.

His insistence on believing in kids no one else would believe in was rewarded. A shockingly large amount of the time.

This week another unlikely member of the educational establishment demonstrated the power of celebrating ganas. West Virginia University basketball coach Bob Huggins made news for leading his team to the Final Four, and much of America’s non-basketball-fanatic population got its first introduction to the man preposterously nicknamed “Huggy Bear.” Huggins’ 33-year coaching career has been punctuated by tumult, personal failings, and truckloads of raw emotion. As ESPN columnist Rick Reilly notes, “The man is about as huggy as an ulcerous porcupine.”

Indisputable Fact #1: Bob Huggins is unlovable. Unlikable.

Indisputable Fact #2: His players love him. They want more than anything else in this world to succeed– and they want to do it for him. BECAUSE of him.

Ganas.

Like the ganas of Joe Mazzulla, the player Huggins stuck with all season even when his shoulder was so badly injured that he had to shoot free throws with the wrong hand. The player who, after West Virginia upset Kentucky in the East Region finals, went looking for one person to hug: Huggins.

Or like the ganas of Da’Sean Butler, whose devasting knee injury during West Virginia’s Final Four game with Duke resulted in a nationally televised image of raw emotion so uncomfortably powerful that it compelled us to look away even as we watched transfixed.

Butler on the court, writhing in agony. Teammates and trainers unable to console him. Suddenly, Huggins on the court, on his knees, right on top of Butler. Faces pressed together, noses almost touching. Butler, he remembers later, apologizing to Coach Huggins for being injured, and Huggins wrapping his hands around Butler’s head and saying back to him: “Don’t be sorry. I love you.”

Butler later stated, “I wanted so bad to win it all for him. He has done so much for me. It was the one thing I wanted to get for him and couldn’t get for him.”

The ganas was there– and Bob Huggins had had the nerve to BELIEVE that it was there. And the audacity, in that televised moment, to care more about the kid than about whichever cynics might have been watching and taking notes. We suspect now that ganas-inspiring moments like that are more common in the everyday interactions between Huggins and his players than we cynics would care to admit.

“Don’t dare to compare Jaime Escalante to Bob Huggins. Escalante is a commendable inspiration; Huggins is just a rulebreaker who somehow manages to whip his pupils into listening to him.”

Reilly correctly points out, “There’s no point in going over all the reasons Huggins is bad for basketball.”  Everyone who knows Huggins’ story knows about them. The DUI. The four solid years of ZERO graduation rate at Cincinnati.  The way he bailed out on Kansas State after only a single year.  The profanity-laced practice tirades that leave the players “bleeding [with] swollen lips and black eyes,” according to West Virginia forward Wellington Smith.

Who could possibly like such a man, or find inspiration in his methods?

Or in the methods of a Bolivian-born calculus teacher who’d lie to students, telling them that their high school’s policies forbade them from dropping his class? Just to get them to “stick it out,” even if it meant they’d risk (in the eyes of most) certain failure?

Or one who’d tell parents of absent Hispanic students that if their children weren’t present in class the next day, he’d call immigration authorities to investigate their resident status?

The storybook Stand and Deliver climax to the Escalante tale makes the edgy methods like these that he sometimes employed more palatable; Huggins can’t lay claim to any Hollywood endings yet. But the ganas of his players, and their willingness to “Stand and Deliver” for Huggins, is undeniable.  In West Virginia point guard Joe Mazzulla’s words:

• “I never want him to forget that I love him. What he did for me, how he stuck with me, nobody else would’ve done it.”
• “We all have one thing in common. We’re all trying not to get yelled at by Huggs.”

Will there always be students who come in with built-in excuses? Absolutely. And they sure don’t need the extra burden of dealing with mine, too.