Maria Elena Gonzalez Cañamero has more than two decades dedicated to preschool teaching in Contramaestre. She is an educator who has dedicated part of her professional life to the attention of the early ages, a teacher who searches every day for alternatives to effectively achieve the integral development of children from zero to six years of age.
Motivating the little ones through different educational techniques is the daily challenge of this rural teacher. She is an educator who, faced with the challenges imposed by the lack of school materials due to the effect of the U.S. blockade and the economic situation of the country, seeks solutions so that her students acquire the knowledge corresponding to this school stage.
Maria Elena Gonzalez Cañamero is the preschool teacher at the Rafael Lopez Fonseca school in the community of La Anacahuita, an educator who has been teaching preschool for 29 years in this rural locality.
Teacher Maria Elena, as everyone knows her, is the educator that every parent would like for their children, because as they say in good Cuban, she is the one who receives the little ones in diapers, and delivers them with almost a first grade education.
Today, Teacher Maria Elena is in front of a classroom of 14 students in the neighborhood of La Anacahuita, and comments on how much she has to do to achieve learning in the students:
Maria Elena, the teacher, overcomes difficulties
“I am going to give you the example of an area, or a dimension: Mathematics. When I am going to prepare the planning, I look for the materials I am going to use, and I prepare a worksheet with books from other years, the Math notebooks, which are useful to me, I cut them out and make the worksheet according to the content I am going to teach (…) and I have to make 28 worksheets, two per student to be able to teach and ensure that the content reaches the students with quality”.
In spite of the limitations with the teaching materials, there are other issues that occasionally threaten good performance: the teacher’s time factor affects a lot, because as a woman, you are a wife, mother, grandmother, housewife, which is everything”.
Teacher Maria Elena is not intimidated by the limitations and imposes her creative capacity and ensures that her students do not lose motivation and manage to appropriate the content, thanks to her alternatives and ingenuity.
