A Mexican rural school makes a plan to enter the digital world
El Colegio Patria becomes the first school in rural Mexico to augment its math curriculum with the Khan Academy, an online learning site geared to kids.
The idea of a Khan Academy Pilot Project in a Mexican rural school began between friends in March 2012. Sitting around my friend Betty’s kitchen table, we asked ourselves: What would happen if online learning were integrated into Mexico’s math curriculum?
I’d already begun volunteering at the school where I thought the pilot project might have some success. El Colegio Patria, in the agricultural town of Las Varas in the coastal state of Nayarit, had two of the three elements I was looking for: leaders with the vision to recognize that the internet offered educational opportunity and sufficient organization within the school to implement a multi-year project.
True, el Colegio Patria lacked a computer lab, the third element of the Khan Academy plan, but that seemed easier to build than vision or organization, especially when I factored in two other key ingredients: Las Varas had internet — it was dial-up and dodgy, but it did exist — and the school already offered basic computer training on 8 ancient machines.
My four years of volunteering in village schools had taught me that poverty is no friend of education. The statistics are discouraging: 48% of state schools have no access to sewage; 31% have no drinking water; 12.8% have no bathrooms or toilets; 11.2% have no access to electricity (International Business Times, September 30, 2015).
The department of education often does provide computing devices to rural schools, which looks good on paper. In reality it is useless because the state offers neither the teacher training nor the technical support to implement online programs.
In my search for a school to launch the Khan Academy pilot, I’d visited the state secondary school (Grades 7, 8, 9) in the village of Chacala. It’s one of the few times I’ve been seriously tempted to steal, or at least cut a deal.
I talked to a frustrated teacher across a desk surrounded by unopened boxes of ThinkPads. “The government sends us computers,” he complained, “ but we have no access to the internet to use them. They gave me this,” he patted the top of a desktop, “but it stopped working two years ago and they won’t send anyone here to fix it.”
What use I could make of those computers in el Colegio Patria! As an escuela particular (a privately funded community school), el Colegio Patria receives not a single peso from the government though it must strictly adhere to the state mandated curriculum.
In 2014, a Mexican educational investigation (INEE) reported that only 43.2% of primary schools had at least one computer for educational use, and of those only 57.3% had internet access. Secondary school stats weren’t much better: 70.4% of secondary schools had at least one computer, but only 56.4% of them had internet connectivity. Surely Mexico can do better than that.
It was ambitious to think of introducing online learning in a rural Mexican school, but the upside potential seemed worth the challenge, particularly because the results could affect many of the country’s schools. Vale la pena, as they say here. It’s worth the pain.
If I’d only known.
The Khan Academy pilot as I envisioned it had three phases developing over three years. In Phase 1, the 2012/2013 school year, we needed to build and equip a computer lab and to secure consistent access to the internet.
Phase 2 required the purchase of 12 tablets to expand student access to online. During the third year, we’d purchase an additional 24 tablets.
By end of Phase 3, and the end of the project, I hoped that the Khan Academy, as well as online English courses, would be integrated into the life of the school.
When I laid out the project, I published a budget: $25,000 USD for the first year. I had no idea how we might meet it.
“No te preocupes (Don’t worry),” Armida, one of the school’s two directors told me. “Si Díos quiere. (If God is willing.)”
God was willing. To my amazement, we made our Phase 1 target. First, the generous donation from my friend Betty and her husband Don provided the funds necessary to complete the computer lab. Then the computers themselves arrived, from an unexpected source. A Canadian dentist visiting the resort community of Chacala announced that he was upgrading all the computers in his office. The old ones were ours if we wanted them.
We wanted them.
Betty and I set about figuring how to ship the computers across two international borders. I might as well have been trying to ship enriched uranium. Used electronics, as it turns out, are highly suspect goods. The summer of 2012, we shipped sixteen computers. Thirteen arrived — we have no idea what happened to the others — and Aimé, a computer savvy Mom in the school, managed to fire up twelve of them. I made a resolve to buy Mexican from that time forward.
The school raised enough funds to buy six new computers and monitors, so that by the beginning of the next school year, el Colegio Patria had an 18-station computer lab. Armida sent me these pictures.
When I arrived back in Mexico in November 2012, Armida and Lety greeted me with enthusiasm, anxious to show me the school’s improvements.
They practically dragged me to what they considered the biggest achievement — a new newly paved space between the preschool and the primary school. “¡Mira! (Look!)”
Look at what? I thought.
Armida and Lety pointed down.
“The pavement must be less muddy during the rainy season,” I ventured.
“¡El pozo! ¡El pozo! (The well!)” And then I saw a concrete lid cut into the pavement.
“And here’s the pump,” Lety flashed open the door of a concrete box in the corner of the yard like a hostess on a TV game show.
“We didn’t have to drill deep,” Armida added, more soberly than her sister but still obviously pleased. “We had water for the whole school all through June when Las Varas went dry.”
For the rest of that school year, every new visitor to the school was taken first to that lid in the ground to admire the miracle of the well.
“Follow me,” Lety demanded, still excited. We marched back toward the school entrance. The area around the tree had been paved and new plastic chairs had arrived, but we walked on by to stop at a shallow curve at the far edge of the concrete.
The curve followed a paved ramp leading down toward the school’s lower level, terminating at a metal grid. “Every year, this flooded,” Lety said, “and the water flowed into the kitchen. Now,” she looked into the grate almost lovingly, “¡Es un milagro! (It’s a miracle!) The water drains away and the kitchen stayed dry all through the rainy season.”
How little it takes to please these two, I thought.
“And . . . ,” Armida said, already moving toward the spiral stairs leading to the second floor.
Lety ran beside her, looking at me, then stopping to scoop her hand toward herself in the Mexican gesture to come. “¡Apurele! ¡Apurele! (Hurry up!).”
We climbed the stairs, passing the Grade 6 classroom where all the kids turned to wave, passing the Grade 5 classroom, and then . . . the new computer lab! Gleaming tile floor, two banks of computers on cheap wooden shelves along the long walls of the room, and, above them, not only a fan, but the only glass-paned windows in the school.
“The Khan Academic can begin,” Armida said, adding her own twist to the pronunciation of Khan Academy. “Tomorrow.”
This is the 16th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. The next story describes obstacles on the path to online learning.
The previous story describes the surprise gift to the school that allowed the Khan Academy pilot project to begin.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
