Art Genius

My good friend Samuel teaches physics to high school students in the morning, leaving his house around 5:30 a.m. to travel to a preparatoria (High School) in Netzahualcoyotl. After a very brief break for lunch, he returns to Ixtapaluca and teaches 20 hours of physics a week in the afternoon to hundreds of Jr. Hi schoolers.

 He frequently relates to me the extreme difficulty of teaching a classroom of between 50-55 students the basics of physics. I've taught Jr. Highers English classes in local schools here, and I always come away thinking that the teachers should be awarded a medal or something. Didactic tools consist of a whiteboard or blackboard and markers or chalk. That's it. It's the teacher...and a mass of brown faces looking back at you. How does anyone learn anything? I have no idea.

 Samuel's real passion, however, is art, and he's a genius at it. Every year the state school system has an art competition. He enters it every year, and he wins it every year. He jokingly states that the real reason he always submits a drawing or painting is to get two days off school. This year he submitted the drawing below. It is an elderly woman in a reboso, or shawl. The theme this year for the art was the reboso.

 Apparently during the competition, one of his fellow teachers came to him and said, "You're not going to win this year! There's a pencil drawing of an old woman out there that is really, really good." What the fellow teacher didn't realize is that the drawing he was referring to...was Samuel's! And he won again.