16 Years Old Girl Became the Teacher of her Neighborhood During Lockdown
Being the neighborhood teacher was a role that Valeria Torres, a 16-year-old Venezuelan, did not expect to play, but it was her turn when word began to spread.
First a cousin came to her, then another … and followed by neighbors, whose education was adrift due to confinement due to the covid-19 pandemic and the closure of schools.
So Torres improvised a kind of classroom at his home in Maracay, a city in central Venezuela, and placed the dining table just outside the front door, the only corner where natural light enters.
“My cousins didn’t understand (their homework) and needed help. As it was within my power to help them, I helped them, and then more children who were not my family arrived” he says while he is attending a long list of duties that he has to deliver in a few days. There was a time when they became 10 students in the same room, also classmates from his school.
It is not a little for this small house of blocks and a tin roof in the La Pedrera neighborhood, where Valeria lives with her mother, her brother and five other people.
In December, for example, “there were so many things to do, in addition to my tasks, that I felt that I could no longer do it. But I had to do it,” says the young woman.
So in January he began to take care of each child separately.
My cousins didn’t understand (their homework) and needed help. As it was within my power to help them, I helped them, and then more children who were not my family arrived, “he says while he is attending a long list of duties that he has to deliver in a few days. There was a time when they became 10 students in the same room, also classmates from his school.
It is not a little for this small house of blocks and a tin roof in the La Pedrera neighborhood, where Valeria lives with her mother, her brother and five other people.
In December, for example, “there were so many things to do, in addition to my tasks, that I felt that I could no longer do it. But I had to do it,” says the young woman.
So in January he began to take care of each child separately.
“I can’t attend to all of them together, so first I ask each of them the due date of their homework, and those who have to deliver faster I attend first. I try to help one child per day, to save time also for me and do my activities, “he explains.
At home, nothing seems to deconcentrate her: not the crowing of a rooster that comes from the dirt patio, not the scampering of other children, not the movement in the kitchen, where her mother prepares some beans. Valeria stares at the notebook, through her thick black-rimmed glasses.
The young woman supports students between 4 and 16 years old who, like her, have not been to school for almost a year and suffer from poor distance education.
He does so while face-to-face classes resume, something that, as announced by President Nicolás Maduro, will take place next month, when schools have been
