Noelia Garella is Argentina’s first teacher with Down syndrome and the news is helping break barriers since many people with Down syndrome are known to have learning difficulties. The 31-year-old is working in an Argentinian preschool class where she teaches 2 and 3-year-olds how to read.
For many years people with Down syndrome have been shielded from society, but the fact is that their IQ’s have increased by 20 points and the majority can read and write, they’re graduating from college, and working professionally, just like Garella.
“I adore this,” Garella told Agence France-Presse. “Ever since I was little, I have always wanted to a teacher.” As a child, she was bullied and even called horrible names by adults, but she’s found a way to overcome those horrible experiences.
“That teacher [who said those things about me] is like a story that I read to the children,” she said. “She is a sad monster, who knows nothing and gets things wrong,” she said to The National.
Even when she was hired, she received backlash because people thought she was unfit to teach. “We very quickly realized that she had a strong vocation,” said Alejandra Senestrari, the director of the school. “She gave what the children in nursery classes most appreciate, which is love.”
Fortunately, children at that age never got to see their teacher as a person with Down syndrome, but as a lovely person that offered them love and was teaching them how to read, which is what really matters.
“The way the children accept her, incorporating her naturally into the school—there is a lesson in life there for us all,” Senestrari.
Garella started working at the school as an assistant in 2012 helping with the school’s reading program. She is passionate about teaching children to learn how to read: “I want them to read and listen because in society, people have to listen to one another.”