Francisco's Notepad

Francisco doesn't have a ton of prized possessions. In fact, he hardly has any possessions at all. So when it comes to his precious notepad (a.k.a. his librito), he holds onto that sucker for dear life. And we're thinking that this notepad has a lot to teach us about hard work and about loss.

Write, Memorize, Repeat

Francisco's notepad is chock full of his hard work. You see, he starts writing down all the new words and math rules that he learns in school in this notebook, and then he takes it with him everywhere. And when we say everywhere, we mean it. We wouldn't be surprised if he sleeps with the thing, and dude even keeps the note pad with him while he's picking crops:

And after I left Miss Martin's class, I continued adding new words and their definitions to my note pad. I also wrote other things I needed to learn for school and things I wanted to know by heart, like spelling words, and math and grammar rules. I carried the note pad in my shirt pocket and, while I worked in the fields, memorized the information I had written in it. I took my librito with me wherever I went. (11.35)

Even though the notebook started out as something he just did in Miss Martin's class at school, Francisco takes it to a whole new level. Did you notice how he's basically always working on memorizing new words and rules? Even working hard in the fields isn't going to stop this chap. He's been bitten by the education bug, and nothing's going to stop him from learning—not working in the fields, not changing schools on the regular, and not missing out on whole chunks of the school year.

Note This: Sometimes Life Isn't Fair

Okay, so this notepad has a lot to do with persistence—and that's cool and all—but eventually Francisco's snazzy little notebook gets burned to smithereens in a fire. Losing this notepad ends up being one of the biggest losses in the whole book, and Francisco freaks out when it burns up. He feels like he'll never get over it, but in the end, it's not all bad. In fact, Francisco discovers something pretty cool:

Then, for a long time, I thought about my librito and what Mamá had said. I could see in my mind every word, every number, every rule, I had written in my note pad. I knew everything in it by heart. Mamá was right. It was not all lost. (11.79)

Even though the notepad is gone, Francisco's hard work has still paid off. He realizes here that he has all his words and rules memorized, so he doesn't even need to look at them in a notebook anymore. Everything he's been studying and learning is safe inside his head—it's his now, so though he feels a sense of loss when his notebook burns, he also gains an appreciation for how much he's learned and sees that his commitment to his education is paying off.