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.

• Yellow fruit confused melon (5). The answer is lemon. Lemon is a yellow fruit, and it’s an anagram (a “confused” version) of melon. Anagram clues are commonplace, and will always include some “signal” word to indicate the rearrangement of letters. (Note that the “5″ in parentheses indicates the number of letters in the answer. This information is often helpful in determining which word or phrase in the clue is being anagrammed.)
• Limo charge includes coffee drink (5). The answer is mocha. Mocha is a coffee drink, and it’s contained letter-for-letter within the phrase limo charge– as suggested by the signal word “includes.” Hidden-word clues, too, always contain some sort of “signal” to indicate the literal inclusion of the answer within the clue.
• Head of Delaware company spins around first Kentucky pier (4). The answer is dock. This one is sometimes called a “charade” clue, and it involves stringing together two or more pieces.
  1. Head of Delaware: The first letter of “Delaware” is “D.”
  2. company spins around: “Company” is commonly abbreviated “co”; “spins around” tells us to run the letters backward as “oc.”
  3. first Kentucky: Again, we take the first letter, the “k.”
  4. Putting the pieces together, D + oc + k = dock, clued by “pier.”
• Terror traps the tickler (7). The answer is feather. This is a “container clue”; the answer involves inserting one word inside another. “Terror” gives fear; inserting the inside “fear” gives feather.

A Few More of Mine

I enjoy solving— and creating— cryptic clues, even in the absence of an actual crossword grid. Here are a few more of my favorite personal creations. I never thought I’d stoop to placing these words on a website of mine, but… Scroll down for the answers.

1. Yankees slugger shockingly razed uglier ox (4,9)
2. Designer article of average quality in rhyme (7)
3. I check Ed, a silly bird (9)
4. Spoiled a shield, left deli meat, ran into true mystery author (8,7)
5. Reportedly bend tiny marks (6)
6. Playground structures, in poor condition, break my son (6,4)
7. Was in debt to poem, they say (4)
8. Term of affection in Latin group hug (2,3)
9. Head of petroleum jelly brand replaced by better-than-average reference level (8)

Answers

1. Alex Rodriguez (anagram of razed uglier ox)
2. Versace, for “designer” (“a” for “article,” plus “c” for “of average quality,” inside “verse” for “rhyme”)
3. chickadee (anagram of I check Ed a)
4. Dashiell Hammett (anagram of a shield, plus “l” for “left,” plus “ham” for “deli meat,” plus “met” for “ran into,” plus “t” for “true.” Dashiel + l + ham + met + t.)
5. flecks (homophone of flex, as clued by signal word “reportedly”)
6. monkey bars (anagram of break my son)
7. owed (homophone of ode)
8. te amo, literally “I love you” in Latin (“team” for “group,” plus “o” for “hug”)
9. baseline (“Vaseline,” with its head “v” replaced by “b” for “better-than-average”)

We’d been a one-vehicle family for about a year, and that one vehicle was a pickup truck that offered super-close quarters for a family of five. We’d gotten used to the running inside jokes– cliched phrases like “stuffed like sardines” rolled easily off everyone’s tongues– and we’d actually learned some significant lessons about cooperating and coexisting in that cramped cab.

Once we decided that we’d embark on a cross-country camping trip, though, we knew that we’d need a new vehicle with enough room to comfortably carry the five of us on a three-week journey. So, we search, study, and select a suitable minivan. Since minivans normally don’t come equipped for towing, we select the optional towing package from the list of add-ons. And, we make an appointment with the dealership to have the towing equipment installed.

Then the fun begins.

A call from the auto dealership. “The wiring harness for your van’s towing package isn’t available.” (The wiring harness is the gadget that connects the car’s wiring to the trailer’s wiring, so that things like brakelights and turn signals will function. Without that plug-in gadget, making those wiring connections involves lots of slicing, splicing, and warranty-voiding.) “We don’t know when we’ll be able to get it.”

Not available?

Two obvious questions come to our minds. The first is: Why is there a $600 line item on our vehicle invoice for a non-existent item? The second, and more pressing, question is: How, then, shall we pull a camping trailer from Arkansas to South Dakota and points beyond?

Turns out that “not available” is a bit of an exaggeration– but only a bit. “Not available yet” is the real story. Seems that significant changes to the construction of the current model-year version of our vehicle rendered the existing wiring harness obselete. (I won’t pretend to know any more of the technical details than that.) Why such a snag slipped under the manufacturers’ radar is a mystery, but there it is. Nothing we can do now, except wait.

Wait for the problem to be fixed. Wait for the new-and-improved version of our wiring harness to become ready for shipment.

Wait.

February. March. April.

Two months until we hit the road.

Will we hit the road?

“Not available yet.” The story doesn’t change. Patience begins its slow metamorphosis into panic. Nothing we can do, except wait.

That’s my take, anyway. Thankfully, my wife Ruth has a different perspective.

She starts researching. Calling. Emailing. Yes, even pestering. Every manufacturer or reseller of consumer automobile towing equipment is on her list. “Do you have it?” “When will you have it?” “Why don’t you have it? What are you doing about it?” She’s not panicked; there’s no edge of urgency to her actions and queries. She’s as patient as she knows how to be– but she’s not passive. She acts, she pushes, she prompts.

And, ultimately, she prevails. The elusive, updated wiring harness is tracked down at last, and– just in time for final camping-trip preparations and practice runs– our real-life minivan finally matches the one that was so innocuously described on the dealer’s invoice. Trailer Tow Package: $600.

“Patience is a virtue”?

“Patience is a virtue”?” Yes, that one’s true. But: “Good things come to those who wait”? Don’t fall for that one. Not if the good things you’re waiting for are truly indispensible and irreplaceable. Precious, unique family memories and experiences– like the ones we plan & hope to have this summer– qualify for that label, don’t they?

Do something about it.

But the reasons to let go are compelling. For one thing, the W3C’s latest working draft on HTML 5 states that the valign attribute will be among those that are dropped because they are “presentational attributes … better handled by CSS.”

Additionally, the pure-CSS fix isn’t nearly as ugly or esoteric as many designers imagine. (See below.) But the biggest reason to send the valign attribute to the HTML retirement community already rightly inhabited by residents like the <font> tag, the <center> tag, and the align attribute is that its usage violates one of the fundamental goals of well-executed web design— that design and content are separate entities that should be handled by separately-served documents. HTML tags and attributes are intended to lay out the semantic, logical flow and structure of a page of web-delivered content. They should not be used to define the particular aesthetics of that structure, and tags or attributes whose primary function is to do just that should rightly be retired.

The valign CSS fix

Here, then, is the most straightforward cross-browser way to handle top-aligned content within table cells. First, add the vertical-align attribute for the benefit of standards-compliant browsers:

td { vertical-align:top; }

Second, wrap the content inside each table cell with another tag— say, a paragraph tag:

<td><p>Cell content</p></td>

Then, define any tags within table cells to have relative positioning at the top of the containing <td> element:

td { position:relative;vertical-align:top; }
td * { position:relative;top:0px; }

That’s all it takes! Here’s a simple example.

Now, HTML purists may object that my workaround of using additional “wrapper tags” unnecessarily clutters the semantic structure of the HTML document. They might argue that this practice is just a variation on what’s often called “divitis”— wrapping everything in <div> tags when other tags would be more appropriate. My response is that, if we’re careful to choose an appropriate tag, then we’re not violating the spirit of HTML markup. Is a <p> tag not completely appropriate for a particular table cell? Well, then, choose another, more appropriate block-level HTML tag. Since the left column of a true tabular data presentation (which is what <table> tags are really, really, intended for) often involves row headings, why not use one of the little-used lower-level header tags (like <h5> or <h6>) to give them the semantic emphasis that they ought to have anyway? My point is that an ultra-minimalist view of tag usage is just as detrimental to good, semantically valid design as is the smorgasbord approach of overusing and abusing tags and attributes. (More on this…)

So goodbye, valign, my old friend; you’ve served me well, but I’m older (!) and wiser now. Be sure to say hello to <center> and <font> for me…