As I wander among the West Philly High School students milling about a noisy garage a few blocks from their school, I can't help thinking, "MIT must be sick of these kids."
MIT, of course, is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the country's august science, technology and engineering university. Its alums have scored Nobel Prizes, founded companies like Intel and headed prestigious schools like Harvard and Johns Hopkins.
West Philadelphia High, as we all know, is a school dealing with every scourge of the inner city. The fallout of poverty, crime and family dysfunction play out daily in its ancient, neglected halls at 47th and Walnut, challenging teachers to keep good kids above the fray and wayward kids from causing it.
So tell me:
If you learned that MIT and West Philly had entered a $10 million, international contest to produce a car that gets 100 mpg, which school would you expect to make it through the first qualifying round of the competition?
Answer: Not MIT.
"Yeah, we beat out MIT," smiles West Philly junior Daniel Moore as he shows me the Harley Davidson 1340 motorcycle engine that he and fellow students are retrofitting for one of two cars they're building in the school's garage on Hanson Street.
"We brag about that a little. But we still want to win the big prize. We want to design the cars of the future."
You know that movie "Stand and Deliver"? About the struggling Los Angeles high-school kids who mastered calculus, inspired by teacher Jaime Escalante's belief that they were capable of the rigorous study that the difficult math required?
At West Philly, Simon Hauger, Ron Preiss, Jerry DiLossi and Ann Cohen are the same kind of teachers, and their students the same kind of kids.
Eleven years ago, Hauger, 40, was a math and science instructor, fresh out of Drexel, who believed that the best way for kids to learn was to sit in rows, in a classroom, taking notes. After four years, he believed, they'd do best to partake in additional college academics, after which they'd get good jobs.
"I learned pretty fast that not all kids learn the same, and that college isn't for everybody," says Hauger.
He was humbled to discover that some West Philly grads who'd gone through the school's Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering (the only certified auto academy offered by a Philly public school) were earning more with their certificates than he was with his fancy-pants Drexel degree.
Hoping to engage the kids who were zoning out at their desks, he started an after-school automotive club in which they could put their math and science classwork to use in the garage.
From the get-go, he urged the teens -a dozen-plus boys and girls, freshmen to seniors - to think big. For the school district's annual science fair, he had them build their own car, cobbled together using donated equipment, scavenged body parts and unique doodads that the kids created on their own.
The students won the contest. The car they created for the next year's fair took top prize, too.
Inspired, they created a car that won first place, in 2002, in the national Tour de Sol, a contest in which competitors develop alternative-fuel vehicles. That's when they first bested MIT.
In 2005, West Philly snagged the award again, cheering crazily as New York's then-Gov. George Pataki handed them the trophy in Albany.
"That was wild," says Hauger, recalling how the team blew out the car's custom axle during a practice run the day before the contest and scrambled to rebuild it. "We worked on it all night."
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