Math is the pivot point upon which nearly all great things academic turn.

Why? Because so few people do it well, and otherwise bridges would collapse. In a casual conversation recently with Mr. Andrew Facciano, parent of several IRHS students, we were discussing things engineering and math related. Admittedly, I know nothing about math, but I do know who earns the big bucks, and it is rarely the poet or the servant. Rather it's the tinker who understands angles, waves, rates, analytics, differential equations, fluid dynamics and the temperature at which titanium melts, in Celsius.

No, we are flush with poets. The help wanted signs, according the Occupational Outlook Handbook, say we need medical people, truck drivers, software programmers, plumbers and engineers. So, the conversation turned to Mr. Jamie Escalante, the esteemed Bolivian-American math teacher who taught at Garfield High School is Los Angeles. While the movie Stand and Deliver took liberties with how Escalante drove the math program to great heights, the results can't be ignored.

Those students who did so well on that AP Calculus Exam that The College Board questioned the validity of those exams and asked those students to re-take the exam. The students replicated their initial exam results and then the big movie was made and everyone wanted to mimic the oracle. He was to math what Woodward and Bernstein were to journalism. The College Board, ever since Escalante, has been scrambling to foster inclusion of a broader array of 9-12 students in pre-AP and AP classes.

Mr. Facciano posited a question with regard to where Escalante's disciples are today. In answer to Facciano's question, many of his former top students went on to become lawyers and activists. A few went into science, engineering and education.

The College Board has a "big tent" philosophy but public and private schools are still very slow to close the achievement gap. The medicine to do that is apparently worse than the cure-year-round school, classes from 8 to 5, mandatory tutoring, few co-curriculars, much, much higher pay for all teachers and a heavy emphasis on Tiger Mom techniques. such as the Swedes. Simply placing all students in tough classes won't do the trick either and usually works against the students' interest as they suffer GPA damage that never really goes away.

So, what Escalante did, over the course of years, not one year, as the movie portrayed, was to hand-pick his math teachers, revise the math curriculum from early grades up and generally ask students to commit hours and hours to learning mathematics.

In essence, Escalante was the first Tiger Dad. His students, some deemed unteachable/unreachable by Escalante's peers, spent hours and hours drilling on math. He got buy-in and they ate, drank and slept it. He appealed to their pride. Ordinary kids with ordinary parents from mostly poor neighborhoods tried. They developed ganas, a Spanish word connoting a deep desire to act and succeed. It's grit. It's diligence. It's I'm not going to be deterred. Escalante tapped into the students' sense of personal and positive ethnic pride. Results came over several years of gettin' it done, in and out of the classroom.

As your children wrap up their scheduling for 2013-2014 and continue to work on their AzCIS webpage activities, independent from Guidance & Counseling scheduling school time to do those activities, don't let the idea of summer school slip away. Repeating a 6-week mathematics class can be a good idea, to shore up areas of weakness and make next year a better year for your budding engineer, physician, entrepreneur, accountant, product designer, astronaut...