I am a teacher. I graduated from one of the most important universities in eastern Venezuela. As a student, I always maintained a respectful, cordial and friendly relationship with my professors, who were not only my teachers but also my friends. It was normal, for example, that after leaving class we would go out for coffee, tea or just to chat about the subject or life.

When I was about to graduate and I was taking the last subjects, one of my teachers of Didactics of Education, made me see how young I was to teach. She also detailed personality traits that could be negative when it came to educating a student. For example, he mentioned that I was very nice and that I should be stricter, I should also be more serious. In fact, he talked about my physical appearance such as that I should tie my hair back, wear different type of clothes, shoes, jewelry, because supposedly those were "distractors" for the students.

You must change because you are very young and if you continue like this, the students are not going to pay attention to you or pay attention to you.

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Then I became another one. I put into practice the advice I had been given. I changed not only the way I dressed but also the way I was. The Nancy as a student was very different from the Nancy as a teacher. In my defense, I must say that I wanted to do my job in the best way, so I accepted any advice or criticism.

At that time I was teaching in a high school and in the first three months of the school year, I realized the mistake I was making: although the students respected me and were disciplined, I felt that they were afraid of me. They could not express themselves fluently, nor did they have the confidence to approach me and ask me a question.

So I took off the "disguise" I had become and went back to being the usual Nancy: simple, friendly, flexible, with loose hair and very enthusiastic, able to motivate the group. That made the difference, not only for me but also for them.

Every day I realized that I was gaining ground with them: they stayed to talk after class, they read novels without me setting them as homework, they invited other classmates from other sections to my classes, they even talked with me about very personal things. Not to mention that their grades went up and they were more disciplined.

One day, a student's mother came to school crying and asked to talk to me. When I went to see her, she told me that her daughter was missing, that she didn't know how or where to look for her. She said she came to me because she always talked about my class at home. I immediately contacted some of her friends and got them to tell us where she was. Her mother and I went looking for her. When we arrived, the girl did not want to go back to her mother, but I talked to her and made her see, from a story we had read, that these tantrums were typical of adolescence. You should go back to your mother, I told her and she listened to me.

Over the years, I met several students from that time who told me about the difference I had made in them:
_I didn't like to read, but after I saw class with you, now I love it.

They say that and I smile, because maybe I have made a change in them, but what I know for sure is that each of my students have made a difference in me.

All photographs are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl.

THANK YOU FOR READING AND SEE YOU NEXT TIME, FRIENDS.