THE TEACHER WHO TAUGHT TO START OVER

In a mountain village in northern Colombia, where clouds hang from trees and goats walk on the roofs of houses as if they were courtyards, there was a small rural school with a zinc roof and crooked desks.

Don Efraín taught there.

He was 72 years old, his walking stick and his back arched, but he kept climbing up the dirt path every morning to teach the few children still left in the community.

– Why don’t you retire, teacher? —some asked, respectfully.

“Because there is still someone who can’t read his own name,” he replied, looking at the horizon as if he were talking to the trees.

Don Efraín didn’t just teach math or history. He taught how to mend the soul. Whenever a child was late, he didn’t ask why. He sat him down, served him water with a pot, and said:

—We’re all late for something. The important thing is to keep showing up.

One of his students was Joaquín, a quiet boy, with big eyes and nervous hands. His father had disappeared a year ago, and since then he spoke little and laughed less.

One day, while everyone was solving an exercise on the blackboard, Joaquín broke the pencil and lowered his head, frustrated.

– I can’t! It always gets me wrong!

Don Efraín approached him and, without speaking, took out an old notebook from his pocket. He showed it to him. It was full of bumps, errors and corrections.

—This was my first year as a teacher. I was more wrong than I taught. But look how it ends…

Joaquín has flipped the last pages. There were children’s drawings, thank you quotes, and a blank photo and black of a classroom similar to his.

—Mistakes are not garbage, Joaquín. They are seeds. You just have to water them patiently.

That afternoon, the boy asked for a new leaf. And he tried again.

Over time, don Efraín began to notice that his body no longer obey him like it used to. Knees were hurting worse. The stick was shaking.

But I didn’t say it.

Didn’t come until a Monday.

The children have been waiting. He was searched for.

That night, his son came down from another city and left a note on the blackboard:

“Don Efraín is fine. But his body has asked him to rest. He sends you hugs and asks you a favor: don’t leave this school empty. If any of you learn something new.. teach him. Even if it’s just one. ”

The following week, Joaquín carried a chair in front of the blackboard.

– Today I’m going to teach you what the teacher taught me: to start over.

He was only nine years old. I didn’t know about pedagogy. But he read out loud a sentence he found in Don Efraín’s old notebook:

“Great teachers leave no footprints on the ground… they leave them in the way you get up. ”

And so, in a little school with more mistakes than chalk, a group of children understood that teaching is not repeating… is to remember that you can always start again.