The usual thing is that the teacher goes to class to teach his students, the logical, the normal, what we are used to is that.
From time to time we are surprised by actions other than some teachers who go one step further, as happened when we met the gesture that Ivan had had with his sixth grade students by sending them a letter to encourage them to continue their effort.
Today from Argentina, we get the experience of another teacher, a teacher who learned from the student who least knew about her class but perhaps one of the most eager to learn.
Lucía Gorricho is a teacher in a small Argentine municipality with 4,000 inhabitants, near Mar del Plata in the Sierra de los Padres. An area in which different agricultural companies operate that hire mostly Bolivarian workers for their work under conditions that have already been denounced by different social and environmental associations for bordering on semi-slavery.
Lucia tells the story in her personal blog impacted by what happened with her student and after asking her permission to publish it in full.
The desire to learn
The family of the student of this teacher is part of those workers displaced from their country and who live in very harsh conditions in this Argentine municipality.
The family of this 14-year-old teenager works in one of the surrounding plantations, in a strawberry plantation specifically (they are known as "strawberries" in this area) and she He told his teacher on the day of the exam that he was completely unaware of the subject he was going to evaluate because he had neither a book nor a folder, I had not been able to buy the academic material.
The exam was important because he supposed that if he passed it, he could pass the year but she had not been able to study anything at all. The teacher knew that the academic level of the girl was not good but that she worked hard to be in school.
Given the situation, Lucia decided to make a change in what to evaluate and decided that The desire to learn could be worth as much as what was learned or even more taking into account the educational precariousness of the country and the personal, work and family situation of the girl and of so many thousands of other children like her.
Lucia improvised a new exam in which she was asked to describe the economic activity of the area and mention the most important aspects of a Latin American country.
The girl wrote for two hours everything she knew about those two topics, with the best intention and with all her desire. He told everything he knew about strawberries and about Bolivia, his native country and Lucia could not help but learn from her and everything he told her in that exam.
That's why she decided that not only she had to learn from this story, from this life, but all those who went through her blog daily.
An excerpt from what the girl told Lucia in her pecualiar exam already says a lot about the situation:
Sometimes life's lessons are not in a classroom but they can also be learned there even if the teachers, as in this case, are students like this Bolivian girl who with all his desire wants to study even if it is precisely life who does not make it easy.
