When a good school teacher sees that one of her students is sad after being teased by another for looks, she might offer words of consolation, or scorn to the teaser, or at best some life lesson regarding the power of words or self-confidence.
But when Ana Barbara Ferreira, a school teacher from Sao Paulo Brazil, noticed her student’s grief after being told by fellow classmate that her hair was “ugly”, she could not stay indifferent: The next morning she restyled her hair to match that of her bullied student’s, hereby going what many might consider above and beyond the expectations from even the most empathetic educators.
“At that moment, the only thing I could tell her was that she was wonderful and shouldn’t care about what he was saying,” Ferreira wrote in a Facebook post that went viral. “When she saw me, she came running to hug me and say that I was beautiful, to which I replied ‘Today I’m as beautiful as you!’”
They both posed for a photo together, smiling and with matching hairdos, and posted it on Facebook. Ferreira has since been widely praised on social media, her post reaping more than 145,000 likes and over 31,000 shares so far.
