By Doug Ford
Sergio Jaurez Correa is a fifth-grade math teacher in Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas. The city of nearly a half million residents is “a flash point in the war on drugs.”
His school is next to a fetid canal and “a rotten smell drifts through the cement-walled classrooms.” After five years teaching “the government-mandated curriculum” that “was mind-numberingly boring to him and his students,” he was convinced in 2010 that he had to try something different. He started searching for ideas.