xx

Paloma Noyola: The Face of Mexico’s Unleashed Potential

When a report emerged in September 2012 that a girl from one of Matamoros’ poorest neighborhoods had attained the highest math score in Mexico, some doubted its veracity. It must be fake, they said.

But it wasn’t fake. Her name is Paloma Noyola, and what most reports failed to mention is that almost all of her classmates also scored very high on the national math test. 10 scored in 99.99% percentile.

Paloma and her classmates also scored in the top percentile in language. Something special was happening at José Urbina López primary school in Matamoros, and Wired went to take a look.

The high test scores turned out to be the work of a young teacher who also came from humble beginnings. Sergio Juárez Correa was tired of the monotony of teaching out of a book and wanted to try something new to help engage his students when he came across the work of Sugata Mitra, a UK university professor who had innovated a new pedagogy he called SOLE, or self organized learning environments. The new approach paid off.

Although SOLE usually relies on unfettered Internet access for research, Juárez and his students had very limited access. Somehow, he still found a way to apply Mitra’s teachings and unleash their potential.

From the beginning, Paloma’s exceptional abilities were evident:

One day Juárez Correa went to his whiteboard and wrote “1 = 1.00.” Normally, at this point, he would start explaining the concept of fractions and decimals. Instead he just wrote “½ = ?” and “¼ = ?”

“Think about that for a second,” he said, and walked out of the room.

While the kids murmured, Juárez Correa went to the school cafeteria, where children could buy breakfast and lunch for small change. He borrowed about 10 pesos in coins, worth about 75 cents, and walked back to his classroom, where he distributed a peso’s worth of coins to each table. He noticed that Paloma had already written .50 and .25 on a piece of paper.

As Mr. Juárez implemented more of Mitra’s teachings in his classroom, Paloma continued to stand out as an exceptionally gifted student:

Juárez Correa was impressed. But he was even more intrigued by Paloma. During these experiments, he noticed that she almost always came up with the answer immediately. Sometimes she explained things to her tablemates, other times she kept the answer to herself. Nobody had told him that she had an unusual gift. Yet even when he gave the class difficult questions, she quickly jotted down the answers. To test her limits, he challenged the class with a problem he was sure would stump her. He told the story of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the famous German mathematician, who was born in 1777.

When Gauss was a schoolboy, one of his teachers asked the class to add up every number between 1 and 100. It was supposed to take an hour, but Gauss had the answer almost instantly.

“Does anyone know how he did this?” Juárez Correa asked.

A few students started trying to add up the numbers and soon realized it would take a long time. Paloma, working with her group, carefully wrote out a few sequences and looked at them for a moment. Then she raised her hand.

“The answer is 5,050,” she said. “There are 50 pairs of 101.”

Juárez Correa felt a chill. He’d never encountered a student with so much innate ability. He squatted next to her and asked why she hadn’t expressed much interest in math in the past, since she was clearly good at it.

“Because no one made it this interesting,” she said.

Although this Wired piece focuses mostly on Sugata Mitra, it does once again highlight the story of Paloma Noyola. Unfortunately, after a brief spurt of media attention, little on Paloma was ever mentioned and, as was pointed out by Wired, nothing was ever said of Mr. Juárez.

As with most stories in the Mexican press — and with in the middle-class — things suddenly become very important once it’s featured in a gringo publication. Which is a very sad commentary. We hope, however, that this story pushes those in the press, state and federal government to look not to the United States for validation but to Mexicans like Sergio Juárez doing good work in places like Matamoros.

The clear message in this story is that there are thousands of Paloma Noyolas going to school in Mexico who, just like her at one time, are not being challenged and therefore aren’t very interested in school. This story can, if we want it to, raise enough awareness to shift the discussion from poverty to opportunity.

Paloma truly personifies both Mexico’s challenges and unleashed potential.

Read the entire Wired story here: How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

Editor’s note: As an addendum, Wired provided information on helping support Sugata Mitra and his School in the Clouds project, and although they donated school supplies and equipment to José Urbina López School, we’re interested in seeing if we can help set up a similar fund for Sergio Juárez, the teacher featured in this story.

Also, $9,300 was raised to help fund Paloma’s education last year. We going to follow with the economist who led the fundraising campaign to see how she’s doing. Stay tuned for updates.

Aries: You fall too hard and are reckless and unthinking. You’re aggressive with what you want and all you do is build yourself up until the other persons annoyed and has no choice but to tear you down. You corner people so they have no moves besides committing or running, and all the while; you probably have people on the side loyal and good who YOU will never do shit for! You need constant attention and reassurance and you’re not half the shit you brag about being. Sometimes you just have to listen and you can’t expect everyone to fall in love with you, or no ones going to.

Taurus: You can’t tailor people into being what you want, people aren’t the clothes you wear to impress the town. People are people and you don’t get to choose how they are and who they are. You’re wrong on this. Wrong. You’re hurting people trying to love you because you treat them like they’ll never compare to your ideal.

Gemini: You say so much but communicate so little. You’re constantly in a state of making up your mind, talking to everyone but the person who needs to hear it. You forget they can’t read your mind, only sharing how you feel when it’s too late for them to help fix what’s wrong. And I think subconsciously you do it all on purpose, just because it’s easier to have it all end than fix it, and then you cry that it’s over. Afterwards you always have other people at your disposal, but it’ll never be enough, will it.

Cancer: You babies hope and wish and never do a damn thing! You create yourself into the perfect little doormat and cry about the dirt you get in return. You’ll do all this emotional labor and reject any in return. And once you can’t stand it any longer, you cut like no other. You turn off all of this babying for a reason apparent to no one, maybe not even you. You have to stop the dramatics and realize love isn’t supposed to be a painful and you need to stop forcing it to be that way.

Leo: You children have to realize you’re adults and you can’t just love the idea of love and expect it all to happen. It’s not grand gestures and then you’re done. The real work is hard, and putting people on pedestals set people up to fall. You’re too jealous without any valid reason! You destroy trust with jealousy, and that’s difficult for anyone to recover from. You can’t expect everyone to match your loyalty, not everyone wants the same things as you so you have to learn to get the hell over it and be an adult.

Virgo: NOBODY IS PERFECT and neither are you! You’re not this beacon of perfection that gets to judge the people who have the “audacity” to try to get close to you with a razor sharp tongue. You need to be open-minded and realize everyone is special, you have to get in touch with how you feel and accept that it’s okay to feel and for others to express themselves passionately sometimes. You’re not a puppet-master, you’re a regular person and need to treat other people kindly, not with judgment.

Libra: You’re fair-weather, as soon as it gets hard, you’re gone. Words mean nothing to you, you’ll act like you’re in love from the start with those pretty white lies but it’s just talk and you take it all back without a second thought. And you don’t care, you’ll do it again. No matter what anyone else says, because you don’t understand the words unless they’re what you want to hear.

Scorpio: You’re suffocating. People aren’t your property, not everyone is trying to be owned. You’re loyal but to the point where we don’t want your loyalty, until it becomes ugly and wrapped up with yourself and what you think you deserve. People aren’t prizes made just for you. Suck it up.

Sagittarius: Everything has to be new new new, you have no patience for actually connecting with people because as soon as it gets tough, you’re gone. You want something on the other side of the fence as soon as you find something new. You can be irritable with people as soon as they’re not taking you on adventures or acting wild and reckless, but that’s not real connection. Sure it’s fun but you hurt people with false promises and misleading intentions. Think about what your affect on people, they aren’t experiences.

Capricorn: You pride yourself on being so fiercely independent but you can’t face the fact that you’re dependent. You always have a new love up next in your orderly rolodex, rarely waiting very long inbetween. Always serious, always turning into something that stresses you out. You’re allowed to have a break in your romantic resume. You need to water your own roots. Don’t dry up other people’s wells and get upset when they’re empty.

Aquarius: You have to perform emotional labor in a relationship, it’s a huge part of the deal, sorry. You can’t just not help people you care about just because it’s hard for you to understand, lots of things are hard; just try. That’s usually enough. That’s it. Don’t be selfish. You can’t take all the benefits of receiving emotional labor and not reciprocate it’s unfair, and you of all people should be able to understand the concept of equality.

Frida fumando y su alumna con una Coca-Cola pintando la pulquería la Rosita.-1943

1. All-or-nothing thinking: Looking at things in black-or-white categories, with no middle ground (“If I fall short of perfection, I’m a total failure.”)

2. Overgeneralization: Generalizing from a single negative experience, expecting it to hold true forever (“I didn’t get hired for the job. I’ll never get any job.”)

3. The mental filter: Focusing on the negatives while filtering out all the positives. Noticing the one thing that went wrong, rather than all the things that went right.

4. Diminishing the positive: Coming up with reasons why positive events don’t count (“I did well on the presentation, but that was just dumb luck.”)

5. Jumping to conclusions: Making negative interpretations without actual evidence. You act like a mind reader (“I can tell she secretly hates me.”) or a fortune teller (“I just know something terrible is going to happen.”)

6. Catastrophizing: Expecting the worst-case scenario to happen (“The pilot said we’re in for some turbulence. The plane’s going to crash!”)

7. Emotional reasoning: Believing that the way you feel reflects reality (“I feel frightened right now. That must mean I’m in real physical danger.”)

8. ‘Shoulds’ and ‘should-nots’: Holding yourself to a strict list of what you should and shouldn’t do and beating yourself up if you break any of the rule

9. Labeling: Labeling yourself based on mistakes and perceived shortcomings (“I’m a failure; an idiot; a loser.”)

10. Personalization: Assuming responsibility for things that are outside your control (“It’s my fault my son got in an accident. I should have warned him to drive carefully in the rain.”)