Mexican public schools are a lottery — some win, most lose
I volunteered 3 years at the local primary school in the fishing village of Chacala. The first year, the students hit the jackpot. The second year was a bust. The third year, the school won a consolation prize.
When I first arrived in Mexico, 4 years before I graduated to Grade 6 in Las Varas, I stayed with my friend Betty in the fishing village of Chacala. Betty and I walked by the pueblo’s 2-room school most days on our way to the beach. The children looked sweet all scrubbed clean for school. Why not join them? We’d never learn Spanish if we didn’t immerse ourselves.
The first day we arrived at the school, the teacher, Veronica, greeted us as if we’d been sent by God. She invited us in, found two rusting desks, and resumed teaching grades 4, 5 and 6 in turn. We didn’t understand a word, but Veronica spoke clearly and with patience and we were sure we’d pick it up if we persevered.
We came back the next day as Veronica was returning graded homework, passing out worksheets and setting each grade to work. Then she came to us, handing us each a sheet of Spanish vocabulary.
“No! No!” we gestured. “It’s not our intention to make more work for you.”
Veronica gave us a patient teacher-smile, used to hearing every excuse in the book, and made it clear that we should work on our vocabulary anyway. All the while, the kids flashed us sly glances.
By the third day, the children had grown used to our freakish novelty, and we all settled down to a daily routine. It surprised us that we could be helpful despite the language barrier. Unlike English, where pronunciation is a minefield, Spanish is a phonetic language. Every letter has a distinct pronunciation — no exceptions. The children read to us, and even though we had no idea what the words meant, we could nudge them toward word recognition when they faltered. Once the letters assembled into something familiar, they rewarded us with gap-toothed smiles.
Over the next few days, our help at the school progressed to simple math (much simpler than I would have expected given the grade levels). Chacala is a hardship post, typically assigned to two groups: new teachers with no seniority or more experienced teachers on probation. By now we recognized that the previous year’s teachers belonged to the second group. By all reports they had been terrible and it was obvious to us that they had not bothered to teach the kids the basics of math. This lack of understanding was a boon for us because we could handle the arithmetic, but it wasn’t so great for the kids.
After ten days, Betty demoted herself to the 1, 2, 3 class, taught by a young man named Aldo. She reasoned that she could escape the math lessons and that the Spanish for the younger children would be slower. Aldo turned out to be as kind and gifted as Veronica, and the children adored them both.
A second legacy of the previous year’s teachers was a truancy problem. To get the local kids back into the habit of attending school as a necessity rather than a whim, Veronica began taking morning roll-call, then sending the older kids out to track down the truants. All this assembling of the troops took valuable time from teaching. Even a good teacher in Mexico’s rural schools faces a lot of non-educational challenges.
To build the rote arithmetic skills her students had missed, Veronica began playing a math game before every recess. She lined up all the kids, then fired out a series of multiplication questions. If the child at the head of the line answered correctly, he or she got a hearty ¡Bueno! (Good!) and ran out the door to play. If the answer was wrong, the kids shouted “¡Fuera!” (You’e out!) and they dragged the offender to the back of the line.
Because Veronica and Aldo made school fun, attendance gradually ceased to be a problem. Betty and I were surprised at what went on in the classroom — rambunctious kids who spent little time in their desks — but we were impressed to see that learning was beginning to happen.
One day Veronica wrapped her arms around Rafael, the chubbiest boy in the class. “Mi hijo,” she said. (My son, literally, but a term of endearment more like “sweetie” or “my love”.) All grades turned to see who had earned the teacher’s full attention. “Mi hijo, eres un gordito.” (My love, you are a little fatty.) She patted Rafael’s chest. “You must chase after the girls more, and you have to be careful what you eat.” Rafael did not appear even slightly offended at being singled out as fat. Just the opposite; he loved the limelight.
“What food isn’t good for you?” Veronica asked the class.
“Coke.” “Potato chips!”
“We didn’t used to drink soft drinks and eat fast foods,” Veronica said. “What is traditional Mexican food?”
“Rice,” shouted one student. “Beans.” “Chicken.” “Aquas.” (Water flavoured with hibiscus blossoms or rice.)
“How many of you know someone who has lost a foot or a leg?” asked Veronica, beginning her lesson on diet and the risk of diabetes. Too many hands went up.
Walking our route back home, Betty and I noticed the man with one leg swinging in his hammock. He’s always there, but we’d never seen him as representative of a systemic social problem before. I looked up diabetes on the net and found that Mexico ranks #1 for obesity among adults. Hispanics have a much higher disposition to Type 2 diabetes and a far higher rate of obesity than either Americans or Canadians. As a race, they appear genetically less able to adapt to recent changes in their diet. More than 10 million Mexicans suffer from diabetes, over 30% of the population. Culturally, it’s no sin to wear a little weight around your middle. “Ah amiga,” women say to a friend they haven’t seen for a while, “¡Tan gordita!” (So chubby! You look great!)
Betty and I returned to Chacala the following December to find a completely different scene. The lovely Veronica and the kind Aldo had been replaced by two of the worst teachers I ever hope to encounter. One was lazy and the other angry. We knew the lazy one could teach, because he gave us an enthusiastic summary of Mexico’s revolutionaries when we first arrived, but he didn’t trouble to offer any of his skill to the students. ‘Lazy’ taught at another school in a nearby town in the afternoon. Apparently he didn’t want to waste any energy on a bunch of village kids he deemed unworthy of his effort.
Betty and I spent three months taking small groups of kids to the library beside Lazy’s classroom. During that time I did not see him write even a single sentence on the board. Occasionally, he read the younger children a story which they listened to over the shouts and denigrations of his colleague in the classroom next door.
One day Lazy sent two boys off to the market to buy a fish. They came back with a huachinango (red snapper) wrapped in newspaper. The teacher slapped the fish on the desk of a shy girl and told her to take it home and have her mother prepare it for his lunch. (Everyone in town knew she was an excellent cook.) ‘Angry’ next door joined him for lunch in the locked classroom while the kids played outside.
The huachinango incident was only one of the many egregious events we witnessed that year. Lazy sent the boys out to wash his car. Angry humiliated kids to the point of tears. Often, neither of the teachers showed up at all. One of the mothers whose son was regularly abused by Angry asked what she could do. I encouraged her to document the teachers’ behaviour and take the case to the education office in the state capital. “Ah,” the representative shrugged, “nothing can be done.”
The third year, a teacher as young and dedicated as Veronica arrived. That was a pleasant surprise. But it was a good news/ bad news scenario. Unfortunately, the state demoted the school from 2 teachers to 1.
Maria de Jesus faced the daunting task of teaching 6 grades of wild kids who had received little in the way of schooling the previous year. Attendance was spotty again and of those kids who did arrive, few worked at their grade level. Like Veronica, Maria de Jesus took the problem in hand. Word got out that a good teacher was back in the school, and the classroom began to fill once again. New kids arrived every few weeks between January and March. Where had they been before?
For Mexican kids, school is like a lottery. Some years, you win; some years, you lose. But education shouldn’t be a gamble. A good teacher every now and then isn’t enough. Education builds understanding concept by concept. When a class misses a year, it matters.
The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) ranks Mexican public education dead last among its 35 member countries. My three years in a rural village school showed my why. In the Mexican public education lottery, too many kids lose.
This is the 2nd story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School.
In the next story, I tackle my first challenge with Mexican kids — their names.
In the last story, I described my experience as a student in the Grade 6 class of a rural school.
