We were lucky to catch up with Luisa Acevedo recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Luisa, thanks for joining us today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?
When I first got here in the United States 4 years ago, I was terrified of not knowing what I was going to face and I was surprised by the faces of many of my students when they saw that a 26-year-old Latina woman was going to teach them French. Every day I have them for 90 minutes, not only learning French but also learning something from them, teaching them something different about my country and showing them how important it is to fight for what you want no matter what. Every day I put myself in their shoes and try to understand how they can lead such a strenuous life at such a young age. They start their day at 5 a.m., or even earlier, they go to school for 7 hours where they only have a 20-minute break to get out of there to complete a work day of 5 or 6 more hours. 6 more hours where they can’t sit down because they work as cashiers or waitresses and they don’t have time to stop. When I ask them why they lead such a lifestyle, because in the end they don’t even have time to spend what they earn, they tell me that it’s a way of keeping busy and feeling like they’re good at something. They don’t want free time because they don’t want to feel alone and because they don’t find pleasure in doing anything else. They have few friends, they can’t go out because they don’t walk, they drive here, and to buy a car they still need many hours of work. This being the case, my class room turns out to be the only space and moment of the day where they can talk with a friend, get out of the routine and dream of something different.
The current educational system is completely forgetting about the current needs of the younger generations. Every day there are more students leaving the classrooms. Every day there are more students who feel they don’t belong to the system and that feel different for one reason or another. The biggest flaw in the current educational system is that it is not focused on the human being. Instead, it focuses only on productivity, data and results. More productivity equals less humanity.
What can we do as educators and as a society? What are the current needs of our younger generations? How is their mental and emotional health? How is our own mental and emotional health being educators and parents?
Luisa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was born in Bogotá, Colombia 30 years ago in a large family from the coffee region. My family taught me about humbleness, service, and love and I think that is why I decided to dedicate my life to serving others as an educator.
As soon as I graduated from high school, I started my B.A. in Modern Languages at the age of 17. During my college years, I learned about morphology, syntaxis and at the same time, I learned how to prepare young humans for life through the teaching of foreign languages. I graduated at the age of 21 and by that time, I had already started my first job as a Middle School English teacher in a private school in a rural area close to Bogotá. I spent almost three years teaching at this school when I received a job offer I couldn’t disregard. I was going to be the first French teacher at another school and I was going to have the responsibility of designing the whole curriculum and materials from scratch. Three years later I decided to join the Participate Learning ambassador community and that is how I left all my life behind to become a teacher in the United States of America.
I am now about to start my 5th and last year as a teacher in the US and this has been the most life-changing experience I have ever lived in my entire life. I met a whole new family, I embraced a completely different culture and I learned more about myself than anywhere else. I survived a pandemic in another country, being away from my family and the ones I love, and yet I made the best out of this uncertain moment we all lived. I decided to start a project I had been dreaming about for years. I became online support for teachers around the world, more specifically in Latin America. Using Instagram and other social media I started to upload short videos teaching them how to use basic tech tools that were going to make their lives as teachers a lot easier. I started to train teachers, launching live sessions about different educational topics every week. Today I can say, I have grown a community of more than 18.000 educators around the world and I couldn’t be prouder.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
At the end of 2021, I experienced one of the most difficult moments of my life. I decided to travel for Thanksgiving, with my partner, for a few days to New York. It was my first time in this city and it was a dream come true for me. Around those same days, my mom in Colombia was going through a very difficult time because her best friend was dying of cancer in a hospital. My mom had been with her in her pain at the clinic for several days, spending sleepless nights with her and sharing the last moments together. I talk to my mom every day on the phone and suddenly she started to feel very strange. I could feel the pain she was feeling with the way she was talking to me on the phone and I thought she was just too upset by what she was going through. The day I arrived in New York, I spent the whole day visiting every possible place, I walked for hours and when I got to the hotel at night I received a call. It was my brother crying, asking me for help because something was wrong with my mom and I didn’t know what it was. Her conversations were increasingly incoherent, she talked about things that had happened years ago as if they were happening at that moment and she did not connect one idea with another. She would wake up at dawn yelling at my dad and couldn’t hold a conversation without crying. Something was very wrong with my mom and we didn’t understand what was happening. For me, the situation was much more difficult and distressing, not being able to be in Colombia with her and my family to support them.
The next day, we decided to ask for professional help. We called a psychologist who, after seeing her and talking to her for a few minutes, realized that she needed to go to the psychiatric hospital as soon as possible. She flatly refused to go and yet, at night, she had the worst crisis we could have imagined. She was completely out of her mind and my family had to carry her to the car so she could go to the nearest psychiatric hospital.
Once there, they hospitalized her for days and did not allow us to know anything about her. Never in my life did I think I would have to go through something like this. I felt a lot of pain and anguish from not knowing what could be happening with my mom. I was afraid that something bad would happen to her and that I couldn’t do anything to help. Four days later my mom was able to communicate with my dad and we were able to find out what had happened. Apparently, he had a very strong psychotic episode due to lack of sleep for so many days in a row in the hospital. In addition, accompanying a family member to die is not an easy task. It even seems that she took a pill in the hospital that he shouldn’t have and this all turned out to be a very painful episode.
My mom had to stay for several more days in the hospital, completely isolated from her family and hardly able to talk to her. He had to take other medical tests to rule out some other type of disorder. I remember very well that at the end of her first week in the hospital, one of the doctors told my dad that my mom might have dementia because of the symptoms she was presenting.
When I heard this, I was very afraid to think what could happen next. I had already been in the United States for a couple of years and my plan was not to return to Colombia soon. The thought of my mom being diagnosed with dementia was my biggest fear at the time. Thinking about how little by little her health was deteriorating and that there would come a time when perhaps she would never remember me again, suddenly became my greatest terror. I decided to enter St.Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in New York and I remembered what my mom always told me. ‘Whenever you visit a new church remember to pray and make a wish’. I remember that I knelt down for a long time, cried a lot and prayed. I promised God that if he helped my mom get out of all this, I would do something to help many more people.
In short, they were very difficult days and months for my family. Against all odds I had to continue with my life, giving my classes and giving the best to my students. The days at school were also very complicated, my students go through very difficult situations with their families and they unload everything on me, the only person who suddenly listens to their stories and sufferings. With God’s help, I was able to get ahead in the best way. Little by little, my mother recovered and that dementia diagnosis was increasingly forgotten. Her medical exams were coming back normal and she simply had to continue taking great care of herself, keeping her mind active since due to normal age issues the brain loses certain functions. My mom was able to continue her life as normal and you don’t know how I thank God for listening and accompanying me.
I decided to start my project on social networks to help many people selflessly and that’s how it all started. This is how I lived one of the moments that has taught me the most resilience and one of the moments that has profoundly marked my life.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I think one of the lessons that I have had to unlearn is to assume that I can know everything about my students and the people around me. We never know what others are going through.
One day I had a very difficult student in class. Her behavior was not the best, she did not complete her assignments and was easily distracted. One day, I went up to talk to her, not assuming that her attitude is personal towards me or my class. I simply ask if there is something going on and if there is anything I can do to help. She tells me that she is going through a difficult situation in her life and to have a little patience with her.
Sometimes our students tend to find excuses not to do the work and we judge them very harshly for having lazy attitudes. However, I have learned to listen, to recognize their emotions and to give them a chance to talk and to tell you if there is anything else.
Days later, this student decided to open up more to me. We were learning the family vocabulary in French class and they had to make a family tree. At that moment, she asked me if we could talk about something else in class because she didn’t like that topic.
I asked her why she didn’t like it and she told me her story. At the age of 14, she met her little sister leaving a well-known shopping center in the city where we live. Right at that moment, outside the mall waiting for their mother to pick them up, a shootout began. Some men were collecting debts between them and in the middle of the shooting her sister was shot and killed. This 14-year-old girl had to watch her sister die right there in her arms with absolutely nothing to do. Her younger brother was also accompanying them and had to see the whole event. The little one falls into depression a few days later and I don’t even want to imagine what happened to their mom and their family. A few years earlier she had lost her dad also in a similar way.
It was obvious that my student was probably going through a lot of depression as well, and that’s why she behaved like that in class. How could I help her? I am not a psychologist and even if I wanted to, all I could do was listen to her, give her time and support her in whatever she needed. Since that day I gave her all the love I could. I greeted her with hugs when she entered my classroom, we had conversations in class, and I brought her her favorite candy from time to time.
Unfortunately, like her, there are many students who are going through the same. Students who lost their family during the pandemic, students abandoned by their parents, or perhaps also parents who cannot be there, either because they are in jail or in another country. There are so many cases and there are so many sufferings of our students that the teaching task becomes increasingly difficult and frustrating. How are we going to teach them trigonometry when emotionally they are not available for it? What is really important then? What support is being given to these children in schools? Although I cannot change the system by myself, if I can raise my voice, learn more and more about socio-emotional education and give spaces in my classroom to talk more to my students I would do it without regrets. Today I finally understand that in a context like the one I am in, teaching vocabulary and grammar rules shouldn’t be a priority. Today I understand that everything else can wait when there is a student who approaches you to tell you about his life. Maybe it’s all they need. Company, someone who looks them in the eye and listens without saying anything else.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @edigicket
- Facebook: @edigicket
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisa-acevedo-0991a667/?originalSubdomain=co
- Twitter: @edigicket
- Youtube: @edigicket