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The test
Mario is walking to the class. In other times he would look all the faces around him. He would evaluate them and he would make inferences about their life, about why they act the way they do, how they end up like that, but not today. Today he is thinking about his future, is the only thing that cross his mind. He is looking to the empty. Even the memory of Samantha´s tender look has gone off his thoughts.
He took a while to get to the class. He is finally there and decides to wait in a corner to confront her . All his medicine classmates look at him in a pity way. Mario ignores all of that. His only thought right now is his teacher. Samantha is at a tree located 50 steps from him. She was looking to her friend when in an instant she turns her head and looks directly at Mario with her deep and black eyes. Mario flips his head. He is yelling inside him. In all his life he has never flipped his head when a girl look at him . Why he did that now? He tries to focus on what matters now. A friend get close and ask him “Are you nervous?”. “No, I am excited” Mario says. “Excited? Are you nuts if you don´t answer correctly the questions you are going to fail this class and lose a year” his friend says. “Yes” say Mario smiling.
Suddenly, the teacher appears crossing the hallway. Mario look directly at her eyes. She get close to him and says “If you apologizes in front of all the class right now, we don´t have to do this”. Mario says “I will never apologize”.
Inside the classroom, the teacher orders to Mario to pass in front of the class. “Mario has questioned my methods of teaching. I will make him three questions, if he mistakes the answers he will get a zero on this class, but if he answers all the questions correctly I will accept my mistake and will change my methods of teaching. Are you ready Mario?”. “Yes” Mario says.
Samantha is in the middle of the classroom. Her beautiful black eyes make that Mario feels a little nervous. While the teacher prepares the book ,Mario remembers the incident. The teacher had put them in groups of three. She asked one of the members of the group one question about the class of Biochemistry. If he doesn´t answered correctly the question the group would have a zero. Mario always studied all the chapters, and all the questions the teacher asked he knowed them. He accumulated 3 zeros in that class and in front of all the students he said that this was wrong. All his fellow students were surprised. This teacher was the most strict in the campus and no one has never said something about her methods of teaching. She said to Mario that he has to prove her that she was wrong. She would make him 3 questions about proteins.
The teacher is ready and asks the first question. “Name the three essential aminoacids that the body uses as source of energy in starvation”. Mario answers immediately “isoleucine, leucine and valine.” The teacher looks at Mario´s eyes and says “Are you sure?”. “Yes” Mario says. The teacher looks at the window and makes the next question “What is the only aminoacid that is essential and no essential?” the teacher asks him. Mario answers “Arginine”. The teacher looks at a sheet of a paper in the desk and smiles , Mario looks at the class, he noticed that outside the class, students of other semesters are watching inside. “Last question. Mention the four enzymes that produce gout when they doesn´t function normally.” “Four? Four?”,the class murmur something that Mario already knows, the principal book of this class only mention three regulatory enzymes. The teacher smiles and Mario answers “PRPP synthetase, glutamine PRPP amidotransferase, HGPRT and …glucose 6 phosphatase” . The teacher´s look changed. “Correct. You can sit”. No one could believe it. The teacher accepts that her methods were wrong. All are surprised.
Mario feels great, his friend asks him how he knowed that last enzyme, and Mario says that he studied all the books in the library even the book that the teacher studied when she was in medicine school. Samantha who sits close of Mario flips his head and smiles to him. With the confidence earned he returns the smile.
