Jaime Alfonso Escalante Gutiérrez was born in La Paz, Bolívia, 31st of December 1930. He was teaching during more than 45 years, moreover, their parents were teachers too.

He started teaching classes in a high school of Bolívia. Twelve years later, in 1964 he had the idea of emigrate to United States of America, but first of all, he stopped in Puerto Rico for studying. Jaime studied some courses of Science and Maths in the University of Puerto Rico.

Then he travelled to California, nevertheless, he didn’t know speaking English yet. There he taught himself English while he was working cleaning floors and doing hamburgers. Jaime graduated in Electronics in the Pasadena’s University. He continued his studies in the California’s University, taking his degree in Maths.

In 1974, he was starting to teach classes of algebra in the Garfield High School. Five years later, Jaime decided to teach calculus,then, most of his students were passing into the AP exams. In 1982, Jaime got an increase in more than a hundred percent of pupils that passed the AP exams, hence, he was gaining the national attention. In 1987, he had 73 of his pupils getting the AP exam and other 12, getting the BC level of the calculus exam. 

In 1988, Jaime inspired Jay Mathews to write the book “The Best Teacher of America” and this book, subsequently, served for making the film “Stand and Deliver”.

Few years later, Escalante was arriving in the top when 570 pupils that presented to the AP exams.

In 2001, he returned to Bolívia, to Cochabamba. He died because a cancer, on the 30th of March 2010, in Roseville, California, United States, with his sons and grandsons. 

Nowadays Spanish schools have different technologies like laptops, tablets, projectors, online books, touchable screens, etc. Past’s Spanish schools only had few books for all the class and notebooks for writing, with a pen, what is saying the teacher.  

However, the cost of yesterday’s school was lower than today’s schools, but, that is understandable because of the salary of the teachers, then was lower than now, and that aspect affects obviously to the cost. Today’s technologies are expensive, and then they don’t exist and now we have to pay its. 

Surprisingly, teachers had the permission of hit to the pupils and other bad things, for instance, if they misbehaved, they were forced to kneel, touching the wall with the nose and holding three books in each hand, all at the same time. Nowadays, if one teacher do that in a school of Spain, he/she is making a crime.