It takes her a half-hour to walk from her rural colonia Servando Canales home across the bridge Las Vacas to her dilapidated school which was built next to a landfill outside of Matamoros.
Her father died recently and now her older sister helps her to stay in school.
And yet, the fifth grader named Paloma Marlene Noyola Bueno has elicited interest from throughout Mexico and beyond because as it turns out, her score in mathematics of 921 is the highest achieved by any fifth grader in the entire country of Mexico.
Recently, a crew from the Arab-language network Al Jazeera featured her on a report from her school – Jose Urbina Lopez – and interviewed her outside the ramshackle classrooms.Her home has no running water and just recently electricity was introduced to her community. The 11-year-old is the top math student in Mexico, according to the national Enlace test, and the wonder of it is that the school serves a community of people who survive by scavenging the nearby landfill.
None other than Sara Ines Calderon, a former Herald reporter, featured her in an article for an online publication.
Paloma’s mother, Guadalupe MartÃnez, asked the state secretary of education to help her continue to send her daughter to school, since she is a now a widow and cannot afford to send her daughter to middle school.
Sara Ines reported that none of Paloma’s eight siblings were ever able to finish middle school because they couldn’t afford it, but her mother said the girl always studied hard — even after her father’s death six months ago.
In fact, there is something about this humble school that somehow creates an environment for math learning since four other students also scored in the 900s in her class.
Enlace found that there were zero errors in her test, and that all of the answers had been completed. The city and state government have been dazzled by the attention their poverty-stricken colonia school has garnered and have belatedly hastened to provide her with a laptop computer which she can use when the lights are running.
7 comments:
Congratulations to this young lady and best wishes for her future. Wish some of our kids locally had the capabilities in math demonstrated by Paloma. The U.S. ranks something like 27th among industrialized nations in math. Most of our local service employees couldn't make change without their computer....or the business closes if the power is out because the kids here (and adults too) can't do simple math.
Who is the teacher and is there a fund to help her?
http://alongsideaborder.blogspot.com/2012/09/gold-medal.html
for another take
Beautiful story and example of hard work and determination.
Maybe a large number of our students take their education for granted. It is viewed as, something they are forced to do. Encourage our students to move forward and understand this is a very competative world we live in.
The secret might be zero distractions, no cartoons, no music no videos, no movies, no shows, no TV period. Good for her, lets see if Ponchito takes her under the citys wing.
Right, there must be something special about this school, the teachers or the environment they are in, because the article says 4 other students in her class also scored in the 900's.
Given that her score was 921, the highest in Mexico, means that the other 4 students in her class who also scored in the 900's must have only missed one or two questions out of the entire math section, with nearly perfect scores.
Juan, could establish a scholarship fund so that we may contribute to it and help this family in everyway possible? We need to bring that teacher to BISD and teach the specialists what math is all about!
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