You鈥檇 think twice about visiting Matamoros, Mexico. The name alone seems dark and ominous 鈥� a town with a history dominated by ritual killings and drug-cartel shootouts, kidnappings, carjackings and missing people, all just across the river from Brownsville, Texas.
Matamoros seems an unlikely place to find an extraordinary teacher.
Yet there is an amazing teacher who is bringing new hope to his students in this dangerous Mexican border town.
Sergio Ju谩rez Correa grew up beside a garbage dump in Matamoros and became a teacher to help kids learn enough to make something more of their lives. He taught as he had been taught: lectures, memorization.
It was mind-numbingly boring for him and the students, and he came to the conclusion that it was a waste of time.
Something had to change.
In 2011, he started experimenting. He searched for ideas online and stumbled upon a video describing the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the U.K.
In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without instruction, they taught themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English.
Sugata Mitra鈥檚 work suggested that access to a world of infinite information has changed how kids are able to communicate, process information and think.
Moving the focus of the teaching-learning relationship beyond the teacher to a student-centred structure proved to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones.
Innovation, creativity and independent thinking are increasingly crucial to the global economy, said Mitra.
Ju谩rez Correa found himself utterly absorbed by these ideas.
At the start of the 2011 school year he walked into his classroom and pulled the battered wooden desks into small groups. When his students looked confused, Ju谩rez Correa invited them to take a seat and then sat down with them.
He started by telling them that there were kids in other parts of the world who could memorize pi to hundreds of decimal points.
They could write symphonies and build robots and airplanes.
Most people wouldn鈥檛 think that the students at his school could do those kinds of things. Kids just metres away across the border in Brownsville had laptops, high-speed Internet and tutoring, while in Matamoros, the students had intermittent electricity, few computers, limited Internet, little to eat and the sound of gunfire in the streets.
鈥淏ut you do have one thing that makes you the equal of any kid in the world,鈥� Ju谩rez Correa said. 鈥淧otential.鈥�
The tech magazine Wired decided to sponsor the school and Ju谩rez Correa, providing them with equipment they鈥檇 need, such as a projector, printer and laser pointer.
In September 2012, a little over a year after her classroom had been reorganized, Paloma Noyola, a girl from one of Matamoros鈥檚 poorest neighbourhoods, had attained the highest math score in Mexico.
Some thought it was fake.
But it wasn鈥檛 fake, and what most reports failed to mention is that almost all of Paloma鈥檚 classmates in Ju谩rez Correa鈥檚 class also scored high on the national math test. Ten scored in the 99.99 percentile. Others also scored in the top percentile in language.
So that鈥檚 the story. I just thought you鈥檇 rather read about the successes of a teacher and his kids in that sketchy border town than the recent news about two middle-class North American children from comfortable communities, one in Nevada and the other in Massachusetts, living out some malevolently fuelled fantasy by murdering their teachers.
听
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
