Loved this movie until I read the book.

When I first started teaching I would watch this movie on a daily basis. I then got the book and found out that the vast majority of the movie is fiction and that Escalante was not a one man show.

The movie made it seem like Garfield never had AP classes, when in reality they did. In fact, Garfield even had AP Calc it's just kids didn't want to take the AP classes because those classes were hard and if they did bad it would affect their GPA. It wasn't like Escalente came up with the idea and shocked everyone.

Escalante was not a new teacher from outside the educational establishment, he had been teaching at Garfield for something like 7 years.

He set up a program where students had to pass certain classes so students would have to prove they were ready for calculus. The movie made it seem like he took kids with no math skills and made them AP Calc geniuses in just 2 years.

Many of the things he supposedly said were said by another teacher who was just as instrumental in setting up the AP program. For example, it was another teacher who told the ETS, "In this country one is innocent until proven guilty."

He never had a heart attack, he had a gallbladder attack which is unrelated to his work schedule.

There was no Angel Guzman, and someone like Angle Guzman would most likely have been washed out before he would have ever gotten to Escalante's AP Calc class.

Although not mentioned in the book, Escalante was not able to reproduce his results in Sacramento because he did not have his "wing men" to help him.