Mexican kids leap over the digital divide
After a rough start, students in a poor Mexican school celebrate learning online
I thought we were set. After two years of work fundraising, building a lab, installing computers and cajoling Telmex technicians, we were ready to go. El Colegio Patria, the small school in rural Mexico where I volunteer, was ready to enter the world of digital learning. The school’s directors had the vision; our lab was equipped with 20 computers (old but not ancient); the students were primed and ready to go. Look out! Online learning could begin.
Or so I thought.
Our first hurdle was age. To open an internet account, an applicant has to be thirteen years old. Our first class, the willing students of Grades 5 and 6, were eleven and twelve. Neither the school’s directors, nor Maestro Alfredo leading the team, nor I, knew how to get around it. Fewer than 10% of the class, and none of the school’s teachers, had computers at home.
I had forgotten how many hours I log at my keyboard — the basic mistake of assumptions again — and naively expected that the world of online would be second nature to both students and staff. Quite, quite wrong. It was clear that the teachers were going to experience all the same difficulties as the students.
The school was hungry for the experience of online learning. Armida, one of the school’s directors, had scheduled classes for an hour every day after school for two weeks, and both students and teachers were willing to come. The age restriction hijacked the first class, disappointing everyone.
Paso a paso, I thought, breathing deep. Step by step.
“My aunt can open an account for me,” suggested one student.
“My neighbour will do it,” shouted another.
So no class that day. The kids ran home to look for relatives or neighbours or friends to help them get on the net.
Though we didn’t make much headway in November, by December, our Khan Academy project had started to gain momentum, until we hit the annual round of Christmas posadas and parades and term-end exams. Stalled again.
We started fresh in January, 2014. The entry was rocky. Some days were better than others, but most days were bad. We foundered on internet problems, computers not working, monitors crashing, and on the complexities of account access, passwords, program IDs and site navigation.
Not only did the children have difficulty creating a Khan Academy account, separate of course from their Facebook or Google accounts, but they’d lost a lot of ground since December. They had trouble remembering how to find the page, how to type in a search term, or even, in some cases, how to turn on their computers. Many thought their email account was their Khan Academy account — an honest mistake — and others believed that because they had originally signed on to the Khan Academy through Facebook or Google, they always had to access it through that route.
Another challenge was that students had arrived at, or left, the school. In rural Mexico, student attendance at escuelas particulares, private schools, is dependent on the financial situation of parents and guardians. Most of the parents of students at el Colegio Patria are not educated themselves and don’t understand the importance of educational consistency. Like parents everywhere, they want the best for their children, so they send them to a good school whenever they can, which means students often arrive or leave in the middle of a term.
These arrivals and departures make it tough for teachers and administrators. The new students have usually missed large chunks of educational basics, and it is difficult to integrate them into classes with students who have been in the school year after year and who have a more solid educational foundation.
Never mind. ¡Adelante! (Forward!)
Once all the students were enrolled, I stood in front of our first Khan Academy group suffering extreme anxiety. Dripping with sweat, not only from the pressure but also from the stifling heat, I tried to explain Khan’s system of building math concepts sequentially.
The students looked bewildered. It was obvious they were genuinely trying to work with me, but I didn’t seem to be be getting through to them. What was the problem — too foreign a concept? My own sketchy understanding of technological issues? My half-baked Spanish?
We finally started to make some progress, and I discovered that in many critical respects the Khan Academy site was worse for Mexican students than it had been two years before. What happened to that multiplication video in Spanish?
No, those first few days were not a success.
I looked at my crowd of hepped-up eleven-year-olds and despaired. If the Khan Academy Project was going to work at all, it was going to have to work as a hole in the wall experiment.
Dr. Sugata Mitra, an Indian educational researcher, carved a “hole in the wall” between a New Delhi slum and his office, put a computer in the hole and watched what happened. Within hours, a crowd of street kids had figured out how to browse.
Raul was my man. Three days into our two week window, he was the only kid in the class who could repeatedly find and use the Khan Academy site.
I told the teachers I was taking two days off . “See what you can work out,” I said, and left.
When I came back the following Monday, all the students were busily working online. I raised an eyebrow at Alfredo, who merely smiled. Somehow he had worked this miracle.
We got down to business. Within ten minutes, Raul had completed an exercise and logged some points. The school’s math teacher, Maestro Alfredo’s assistant, still did not get the picture, and frustrated me with his lack of understanding. Nevertheless, more smiles began to break out around the room. Other students were beginning to crack the code. By the end of the class, Raul was sailing, and several other children were successfully launched into the stream.
The next day, Raul showed me the points he’d racked up. Eduardo was close behind. Aha! I thought. We can make this a class challenge.
I drew a chart like a United Way campaign thermometer. Every day, we’d tally up all the points gained by the class and chart our progress toward our goal — 500,000 points — the number I thought the kids could comfortably achieve.
The following day, Raul signed in, chose a unit on division, watched a video in Spanish, worked his way through a set of exercises and rapidly gained more energy points. All smiles.
Then he clicked on the next unit — Wham! He was stalled. The explanatory video was in English, one of many videos not yet translated into Spanish.
Uh-oh, I thought. We’re done.
Raul played the video a second time, concentrating on the numbers. I watched him nod in understanding as he pressed replay, again and again. Finally, he advanced to the practice exercises.
Carlos Slim’s translations hadn’t gone as far as I’d hoped. The kids got discouraged. Our progress slowed. It looked as if I’d been far too ambitious in setting the number of points the class might achieve. By the beginning of Day 3 of the second week, our goal looked completely out of sight.
But then the kids surprised me. They figured out two things — both clever, though one far more beneficial from a learning point of view. In the not-so-educational move, the students realized that they could work on simple concepts they already knew in order to run up points.
Pretty smart, I told myself, and I could even argue that they were giving themselves an important review. They were not, however, expanding their math skills.
The second move was more impressive. Although many of the exercises were simply number problems — easy for the kids to understand — others were word problems: “When John’s mother arrived in the grocery parking lot, there were 27 cars in the lot. When she left, there were 49 cars. How many cars arrived in the lot while she was shopping?”
Most of these word question were only partially translated into English, and usually not the verbs. “Cuando la madre de Juan [arrived] en el estacionamiento . . .”
“Arrived,” one student shouted out the word where he got stuck.
“Llegó,” came the translation from across the room. Fired up by the math, the students automatically took on the English. In their excitement, no obstacle was too great.
These two new strategies got the students back on track. As the points mounted up, so did their enthusiasm. They stayed past the hour. They helped each other over obstacles. One student arrived with a new tablet he’d pestered his father to buy. The math teacher finally understood what was going on and started providing real instruction.
Everybody was having a grand time and our goal seemed attainable once again.
Children from other classes hung around outside the computer lab, curious about the shouts and groans and cheers. By the end of the week, we had not only achieved our goal, but the children’s points had sailed so far off the chart that I had to add another sheet of paper.
Our entry into online learning may have been rough, but that only made our triumph greater.
Armida and Lety bought soft drinks and pizza and staged a party in the school’s lunchroom to celebrate the kids’ achievement.
I left to go home to Canada ten days later, but not before I’d begun working with the second group of children to stay after school to enrol on the Khan Academy.
Alfredo and the math teacher carried on. Armida and Lety kept in touch, informing me that every two weeks over the rest of the term, students enrolled on the site. Each grade level moved through their own challenge and celebrated their success. Group by group, twenty students at a time, every one of the 180 children in the school entered the digital world.
Our online learning project was launched! 180 excited kids banded together to build a bridge across Mexico’s digital divide.
This is the 20th story in the publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. In the next story, I look at the biggest challenge presented by the Khan Academy success. How could 180 students continue learning online if the school only had 20 computers?
The previous story describes my experience trying two new approaches to improving math instruction in rural Mexico.
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.
