Teachers Who Never Fail
On January 15 of last year, a reader posted the following comment on my article thanking Venezuela’s exemplary teachers: “…my mother was a teacher her whole life. She raised four children on her own, who are all professionals today, and she worked in a high-risk area with children from troubled homes with many problems. She had to travel by shared taxi an hour from our home. She never complained, and she never called in sick, not because she never got sick, but because she didn’t want her students to fall behind. Her nickname was ‘Paper Mate,’ the pen whose slogan was that it ‘never fails,’ until she retired because she couldn’t go on any longer, after I don’t know how many years, with her high blood pressure…”
That teacher, like so many women (and men) living in our country today, was named Elvira Ramos.
Today I once again thank all those “Paper Mate” teachers in every corner of our country, who sometimes give their lives in those classrooms, where so many boys and girls depend on them to become good men and women.
Because much of the future of this new generation is in their hands, and that must be a daily encouragement in the face of the thousands of difficulties they live with day after day, in a country that, sadly, has not yet realized that education should be its top priority, and that teachers should be among the best-paid professionals (as they are in Japan).
We all know that studying education and being a teacher in Venezuela deserves the most complete and absolute admiration. For a young person to decide to study education is truly heroic (even more so if he is a man), because unfortunately many families have not understood the importance of the profession, and sometimes all they can say to their son or daughter is: “But how are you going to make a living?” And well, in a way they may be right, but how wonderful it would be if we encouraged our children to study this profession and helped them, by every possible means, to develop their vocation.
Of course it is hard to be a teacher in Venezuela. How many of us don’t know teachers who spend hours squeezed into minibuses or the Metro, or fighting enormous traffic, to get to the school where they teach? Or how many have to arm themselves with patience and fortitude to keep working, exhausted, outside school hours because their salary doesn’t stretch far enough? And as if that weren’t enough, you sometimes wonder: how can a teacher patiently teach twenty, thirty, forty children or more a mountain of material, when only after sitting down with your own little ones (one at a time) to help them do you realize how hard that is? And here is something else admirable: how can a teacher manage a group of students when some, or many, of them are extremely restless or badly behaved?
Despite all the obstacles, our “Paper Mate” teachers know what their mission is, and they devote themselves to sowing not only academic knowledge but also values in their students.
How many teachers do we know who work in schools that lack even the most basic resources? Yet they find ways to work however they can. They neither fail nor abandon those children because, as the exemplary Venezuelans they are, they have hearts with an inexhaustible love. And they do not give up their task, because they know these children and young people are the future of our country, and that what they sow they will reap in satisfaction and in a future that may become very great.
A thousand thanks, Venezuelan “Paper Mate” teachers. I am convinced that, sooner or later, our country will reward you for everything you have done. Because always remember that the children and young people you are forming are the future of Venezuela, and they are the ones who, God and the Blessed Virgin of Coromoto willing, will hold the reins of this great country very soon.