Interview with Miss Juanita

1. What is the most defining feature of Miss Juanita's personality and why?

I think something that characterizes me is my energy. Those who have had the opportunity to have class or spend time with me can notice that I have excess energy and I laugh for everything. Being honest, and giving things the mood, I'm Hyperactive, impossible not to have excess energy! Well, that and I really think that every day is a gift so I choose every morning as I meditate, be my best version to be happy and make others happy.

 

2. When did you decide to be a science teacher? Why?

This is perhaps one of the first stories I tell my students when we first met. It was never in my plans to be a teacher, in fact I remember quite a lot that at school and when I chose to study biology I said, "NOOO I couldn't be a teacher, that level of patience I don't have, I would go crazy!" A little more than three years ago my first experience as a teacher was at the University of the Rosary teaching in the first semesters, there I noticed that I enjoyed the subject quite a lot, but I felt weird not to be like the rest of my colleagues. After that I went a short time to work as a researcher at the University of California in Riverside, I considered myself a happy human being. Imagine, as a biologist in one of the best university learning about entomology and genetic evolution, madness and the best experiences of my life. In fact, after that experience I believed and considered that would be my field of action, but when I returned to the country I found the reality of many professions, there is no work in what we dream or believe in at that time. There my life changed, I was called from a school in Bogotá to offer me a position as a science teacher for pre-primary (4th to 7th), I considered it much more as I had just graduated from it. I started super nervous and without the slightest idea of how to teach anything. I decided, therefore, that the best thing I could do was not to become those boring teachers I remember from my childhood and, indeed, I fell in love with teaching. I don't see myself doing anything different today.

 

3. What's the biggest challenge you feel you've ever been through as a teacher?

I think I've had two quite challenging moments, the first to start teaching when you've formed your whole life to do research or speak in too formal and quadrupled language. It took me a lot of time to release that mold of a scientist to let the Juanita teacher out.

 

And the second, no doubt the situation we are going through. JAMIS I considered the possibility of going through a pandemic, I never thought I had to dictate classes virtual! I'm used to dictating classes full of games and experiments, where there's noise and movement all the time.

Of course it has been a challenge to transform the way of teaching, to make sure that the boys are there waiting for everything and that they are not bored is much more difficult through a screen. It is a work that now requires a lot more planning than before, more creativity and indeed a lot more energy! It is challenging, exhausting yet to see what we are achieving as a degree and community literally makes me cry of happiness.

 

4. One of the most defining features of your classes is creativity, how do they constantly merge creativity with science? Do you have a particular methodology?

Being honest I have always believed that learning must be a process, something I tell the boys a lot is that I strongly refuse to be one of those teachers of years that only put us to read, memorize and answer questions that after the exam I didn't know how to answer. I also believe that science allows us to be eternally children, leads us to be curious all the time and to discover a number of things every day! For the same reason, I believe that science should not remain in the scientific community, which is something that is happening lots! but on the contrary it must be within reach of all! It must have a language that we all understand, because in the long run we are doing science without noticing it.

 

Well, that's a question I don't even know how to answer. I think I always put my personality in every class and constantly think of experiences that generate such an impact on children that they are not forgotten for anything in the world because it led them to analyze and establish a relationship beyond the basic. Every game, every "madness" has an end, it's like a treasure search. I think of each unit as a game of a couple of weeks where I'm giving the kids clues, yet in the end it's them that surprise me with the complex mental constructions that they generate...

 

5. What message do you let your students want to focus on the area of biology and science in their future?

Biology, and any branch of science, is a magical universe. Every day how scientists give us the opportunity to be children again, to ask, to be curious and to play to reach a conclusion. Obviously, if it was for me to want everyone to be biologists however, it seems more important to me to tell the general students that in life we are made to be happy and when we do what we really love, we feel no burden at all. Study or work on something that moves every fiber in your body, don't worry about anything else because when we do what we love, the rest of things are coming. I remember a lot that my friends said I was going to starve to be a biologist and, here between us, obviously I'm too happy, I love my job, I love my career and I'm not starving, I'm not starved, I'm going to be hippie, but it's the truth.