Translated by Alise Rule
In spite of the isolation and the poverty that their communities face, even with the certainty that upon returning they will have to rebuild “even the school”, Omar, Armando y Diana have a dream in common: to finish their training as teachers for the Telesecundaria [middle school Internet learning] program and return to the Tierra Caliente [Hot Country, i.e. coastal] region in Michoacán, where the lack of teachers “makes it impossible to guarantee that everyone can study, as the Constitution says.”
Protected inside a tent from the sun falling heavily on the encampment set up by dissident teachers in the Manuel Tolsá Plaza [in Mexico City], they assure that the education reform and the application of a standardized evaluation to determine who is a good student “is not a solution to the educational problems in our communities.
“Our training is a bit outdated, but it depends on each one of us improving. The challenge is that there are not enough teachers, although the government says that there are plenty of us. In our towns they are needed, because where there are schools the staff is incomplete or multi-grade, though dozens of kids are without schooling,” Diana affirms.
"No one wants to go to the most remote places. Everything is isolated and there is nothing, sometimes not even a school. Only kids to look after and parents that ask for someone to come out to their little settlements. It is pure need and almost no support,” she explains.Nevertheless, and in spite of facing the social deterioration of the teaching workforce and the low salaries, they are convinced that being a teacher is “much more than teaching and applying knowledge.”
Being a teacher, says Armando, 18 years old and native of a rural community in the Tierra Caliente, is also,
“becoming a friend, a partner; being like a parent to your students. It’s not only a person who teaches, but who can understand the needs of each child or adolescent. I want to be a teacher because there is not even a school in the town or nearby. Many children have to travel from one town to another to get an education. They don’t make the trip by car, they walk and over a long distance.”