Kids are hardwired to learn.
In Mexico, that’s good news. Mostly.
One day I walked into the classroom of the village school in Chacala where I’d been volunteering to find a group of kids crowding around Alexis’ desk. I adored this kid, still do. He was in Grade 5 then, small for his age, with a crooked smile and a sweet nature.
This was during the year of the duds, when the school’s two teachers often didn’t show up and didn’t teach much when they did. One was angry and the other was lazy. For the children, it was a lost year. Except . . . nothing stops kids putting information into their brains, not even a lack of teachers, books or resources.
Alexis worked at his grade level, or even beyond, which I consider extraordinary given the circumstances. Everyone in town knew how bright he was, including the other kids. They wanted to learn and they knew Alexis would teach them, so they waited patiently beside his desk. He corrected their homework, gave them assignments and helped them figure out what they didn’t understand. He was a master, a maestro, a teacher.
I dragged a small desk to sit beside Esme who had been actively and unsuccessfully trying to get Alexis’ attention. Esme, a little Botero girl, was fat-cheeked, fat-limbed and had deep folds at every joint. She dressed fashion forward and always showed up in charming little outfits quite cannily put together. That morning, Esme scrunched her face over her work in willful concentration, clutching a pencil in one hand and a bag of cookies in the other.
“May I see your book?” I asked.
Unwilling to let go of either her pencil or her cookies, she pushed her work forward with her elbows. ‘Draw your favourite animal’ the instructions read, above the outline of an empty box. Esme had filled the box with angular letters, forcefully engraved into the paper: D . . R . . A . . W . .
All children want to learn, including those who have learning difficulties, and they’ll keep at it long past when you or I might give up. In 2011, my friend Betty and I often read stories or played games with the children in the library adjacent to the school. One day we were playing flash-card multiplication. The kids collected the cards in a stack beside them when they answered correctly. At the end of the game, we tallied up the cards and the children told me how many they’d won.
“10, 9, 12.”
“15,” said Abigail, shyly pushing her pile of cards toward me.
“¡La ganadora! (the winner!),” I announced, to the amazement of us all. I raised her hand in victory, and Aby looked radiant. I’d been throwing her easy questions, which she clearly didn’t need, so the next round I asked all the questions as randomly as they came up. Aby won again, we were astonished again, and her big black eyes brimmed with pride.
Later, when we went back to written math, Aby became confused and was unable to answer correctly, performing as she usually did. Her teacher and the other kids always treated her as if she were slow, but that day we made an important discovery. Abigail has dyslexia, or something close. She can learn, just not like everyone else. I knew that she wouldn’t get the help she needed, because neither I nor anyone else in this pueblo was qualified to give it to her, but for the next few weeks she stuck close to my side and together we guarded her brief triumph.
Then there’s the case of Cezár, Alexis’ younger brother, a scrawny kid with a huge personality. He arrived in Grade 1 and took over the school. At recess, whenever the kids were forming teams, Cezár always became captain despite his small size and his lowly status as a student of Grade 1. “I’ll take the new kid,” he said, choosing Sacbe, who’d been in the school for well over two months. Cezár was the kind of kid who’d pretend to enter the school, then take a quick detour, scramble up a nearby tree, swing from branch to branch and drop down in front of a girl scaring the wits out of her. You know the type. If we held a soccer competition, he won it. If the kids staged a race of any kind, he won. If we played a game of chance, like dice or Bingo, he won that too.
Betty and I, doing a school year book, asked the predictable question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Most of the girls wanted to be hairdressers. The boys said fisherman. These kids know nets and knots, math not so much. Like all kids, they learn what surrounds them. Alexis, who destroyed his elbow over the Christmas break, has seen the inside of a lot of hospitals lately and wants to be a doctor. He’s the one kid here who could do it, not only because he’s bright and focused but because of his generous heart.
Then we asked Cezár, “What do you want to be?”
Cacique, he said, a Zeta.
Children will learn. It’s what they do, but we all have some say in the lessons they’re offered.
A cacique is a political boss, often a charismatic strongman who grabs power by force of personality and keeps it with just plain force. Mexico has been ruled by corrupt politicians since the time of the Spanish conquest. It’s what the Mexican people are used to, especially the poor.
Zeta? A week earlier, the school was shaken by an explosion followed by what sounded to me like gunshots. “What’s that?” I asked. The kids shrugged. Minutes later, more shots. “What is that?’ I asked again.
“Zeta,” Ubaldo answered, not even looking up from his book.
Zeta? Really? A drug cartel? Was Ubaldo having me on? Did he use the name as a general term for thugs? Drug lords in Mexico specialize in random violence. Three weeks earlier, in Guadalajara, the Zeta had shot 28 members of a rival gang and distributed their body parts around various public plazas. It was not a subtle message, and it was a lesson the children were learning.
They also learn to look after one another, to care for the elderly and to celebrate. Families gather for fiestas at the slightest provocation; a girl’s quinceañera (15th birthday) makes her princess for a day; schools close for the celebration of a saint or a revolutionary hero almost every week. Rural Mexicans live a harsh reality where their government offers them little in either protection or services. They also live in an environment where family and faith and tradition mean a lot. They live life as it comes to them, immersing themselves in each and every day. That’s the lesson we take from them.
This is the 4th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School.
In the next story, I describe our attempt to give back with a program called ‘Let’s Jump Into Health’.
In the last story, I tackled my first challenge with Mexican students — their names.
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.
