READING OF THE CASE:

“CARLOS AND FREDY, IF I WERE THEIR TEACHER ? ”

THE CONTEXT

Carlos and Fredy are two children who attend the “Patria” Federal Urban Primary School, located
south-west of Mexico City in an area of social housing units. Currently its service areas are
concrete buildings with large classrooms, auditorium, parking lot, library, teacher's room,
cooperative, school office, administrative area, management and a computer room.

Both children are second grade students and have Susana as their teacher. Married, with three
professional children and grandmother of a two-year-old girl, Susana has been a primary school
teacher for 28 years.

CARLOS

Carlos is a boy who has just turned seven years old, the second son of Pilar and Pedro, a couple
who have been married for ten years and have three children; María the eldest, Carlos and Pedro
the youngest, just months old. Pilar, although she studied social work at UNAM, is a housewife and
dedicates most of her time to caring for her children. Pedro is an engineer in an auto parts
assembly company where he has been climbing the career ladder and currently has a job that
allows them to live comfortably. In this situation, they have thought about moving to another
neighborhood and sending their two oldest children to a private school.

He wasn't even two months old and he was already sticking his head out of the crib, looking at
everything carefully. This exceptional curiosity for his age was the first thing that caught the
attention of Carlos's parents. Pilar, his mother, remembers that at that time they affectionately
called him “the periscope” because of the way he extended his neck to observe everything that
was around him.

However, he was a baby who took a long time to start talking. “We were so surprised that he
didn't say anything that we decided to do tests to check that he wasn't deaf. Until one day, at
eighteen months, he suddenly said 'he fell', we were all amazed. From then on he started talking.”

When Carlos entered kindergarten he already knew how to read, he had learned on his own, by
observation, during a summer from the age of 3 to 4, when his mother helped his sister María.
Despite this, he began to have problems; The teacher complained that the boy was bad, that he
didn't pay attention in class and that he was too boisterous. Until he was 5 years old when another
teacher understood what was happening to him; He was an exceptional child with an intellectual
capacity far superior to that of his classmates, you just had to learn to get his attention, to interest
him in classes. It was then that Carlos began to bring more homework home than the rest of his
classmates, to read more stories, to do more exercises... It was the way to not get bored in class.
Pilar tells us about the love that Carlos developed for reading from a very young age, “At 6 years
old, the only thing he asked for in his letter to the Three Wise Men was a BBC encyclopedia about
dinosaurs. It was an encyclopedia for adults, full of scientific names. With just one reading, Miguel
had memorized the names of the plants and animals... His capacity for observation and memory
has always been amazing. Recently, while looking through an Anatomy encyclopedia, the same
thing happened: after a single reading, I had not only understood everything I had read, but had
also memorized it. It is another thing that draws Carlos's attention, he does not use dictionaries,
he always consults his doubts in encyclopedias."

But not everything has been a bed of roses for Carlos's family, when he was 8 years old his parents
and Susana, his teacher, began to worry about certain emotional problems. In recent months,
Susana has noticed communication and behavioral problems with her colleagues. He has become
a sad and unsociable child who has a hard time expressing feelings. He is withdrawn and despite
his learning qualities, his grades have dropped.

FREDY

Like Carlos, Fredy is a 7-year-old boy, son of Patricia, a 25-year-old single mother. In the mornings
she is a domestic worker and at night she runs a quesadilla stand to increase her income. Together
with her son, she lives at her parents' house, who have helped her take care of Fredy since he was
very little.

Although Fredy attends second grade, he does not know how to read or write. Their reading and
writing knowledge focuses on the recognition of vowels and consonants but individually. He can't
form a word, much less read it. As for writing, you can do it in capital letters but also individually.
When dictating a word, for example MESA, write: EA.

In his class notebook, he tries to draw the letters he can see on the blackboard, but he does not
understand their content.

The tasks that must be done at home are done like this:

Teacher's instruction: Write sentences with: HOUSE, BOOK, FLOWER, SCHOOL

Task prepared by Fredy:

KJDIEKMLL HOUSE PIFAUÑO BOOK BAMSTIACE…etc, etc

Fredy tries to do the task and in all his innocence, he believes that he is writing sentences and does
not understand why the teacher Susana writes crosses on his homework if he complied with the
instructions.

Susana, noticing that he is not at the level of the other classmates, makes him sit at the end of the
class and completely ignores him because his slowness harms her and the entire class.

When Patricia attends the school called by the teacher Susana, she announces that Fredy will
unfortunately repeat second grade because he cannot learn the minimum contents of this grade
to pass the year.