Aymara Dream by León Zamora (why is a good book to teach with)

Brenda Rivas Reyes, SPED 360
Aymara Dream by León Zamora (it is a chapter book).
Class information: Listening and Writing, 6th Grade.

This book teaches about the importance of accepting and being proud of your ancestors, specifically those with indigenous ancestry, and never judge or make fun of other’s people skin or culture. I want my student to learn that the most important love they can receive in the world is the love that comes from themselves first.

This book was written by a rural education expert in 1995, and I would like to teach with this book to scaffold my students’ writing and listening skills. Aymara Dream has an important and complex message, however, it is told through a simple, fun, and sweet narrative.

Lesson plan
Because it is a long book, I would do a summary with the highlights of the story and give each student a section to read out loud. Those who are not confident enough to read out loud would write questions they have while they listen to their classmates. When the readers finish the summary of the story, I would collect the questions from the listeners and pick from a hat questions randomly (this is to avoid making them feel uncomfortable sharing their questions, I don’t want them to think their questions are not good or are dumb). When we have answered every question and doubt about the book, I would ask them to write their own version, a short summary of what they consider to be the most important lesson from Aymara Dream. I do not want them to acquire blindly my perception of the book, I want them to develop their own.

What did this book and this process teach me or remind me?
Dream Aymara is one of my favorite books of all time because when I first read it, it made me feel like I had discovered the most important lesson of my life, and I started to see the world and people differently. Reading it now thinking about my students and how to teach with it, I felt that it was all different again. Aymara Dream is an adventure story about 5 friends (Basilio, Julia, Hortensia, Timoteo, and Mariano, who is blind, by the way) who live in a small town near the Titicaca lake, they are from the Aymara Tribe. In the beginning, you learn a little bit about their culture and their language (they are from Peru, but their tribe speaks Aymara, not Spanish). The first shocking event is that their teacher quits, and a different teacher arrives. This teacher is a white lady who speaks Spanish and treats them rudely if they speak Aymara. This is definitely a part that I would include in what my students will read in class, not to scare them but to help them reflect on how wrong is this teacher’s attitude toward the students. She treats them so badly that they end up quitting school, and that is when they went to town and realized that their friend Julia is missing.

The 4 friends go looking for Julia as if their lives depend on it and it is on this travel that they teach us very important lessons about diversity. My favorite part is when they come across a party where white people, speaking in Spanish, dance to indigenous music wearing masks. Hortensia and Timoteo fall into the trap (they were traveling through the “Manqha Pacha”, which is like hell for Aymaras) and put on the masks that also turn them into white people. Hortensia remembers Julia's indigenous pride and understands in an instant what that desire to want to be white, denying her origins and Aymara customs, means. So she drops her mask and forces Timoteo to take it off as well. When she does this, the rest of the people’s maks fall as well and most of them start to cry and yell when their skins became brown again. Hortencia says “I’m Jaki and I have my pride!”. This is exactly what I believe is the main idea of the book, to teach that your skin represents your family, your roots, your blood, and it is something you should never be ashamed of, and never be judged for.

The first time I read the book I did not give so much thought to the new teacher’s attitude, it just upset me. But this time, reading from an educator’s point of view, I felt disappointed and sad. This teacher at the beginning of the book acted as if speaking Aymara was embarrassing and disgusting, and she punished the kids for not paying attention to a lesson that was not in a language they could understand. She was doing her best, I want to believe, she just did not have the knowledge or the proper preparation to teach. She was not teaching kids, she was teaching her lessons without taking into account the kids’ needs. She could have taught them Spanish, she could have spoken in Aymara so they could understand her intentions and learn something. She could have done so many things, but when the kids quit school she did not see moved at all, and this confuses me. Because I believe that educators must love to teach and must have a real interest in their students’ learning process. It should not be just for the money.

What I believe this book has taught or remind me this time is that my biggest interest must not be the salary (though it is obviously important), but my students’ well-being. I want to be the teacher my students love and respect, and I want them to learn not for passing the tests, but for their lives. I want them to feel comfortable in their skins and I want them to be strong enough to make a difference in their families and in their communities. There is a phrase on a song I like that goes “everybody can save the world but no one wants to try”, and well, I want to try. I’m willing to do my best. The world needs to know that segregation is never the right answer, that race is not something to be laughed at or be judged for. Because our skin does not change who we are.