Overview
- The teacher, 25-year-old Estefanía Rivero, shared the method on TikTok and the post drew more than 115,000 likes and national media coverage on Thursday, May 21, 2026.
- Rivero introduced the system during a substitute placement in sixth grade at Escuela Las Hornillas in Pocito, San Juan, mapping numeric grades to players so a 10 is Lionel Messi and a 9 is Julián Álvarez while lower marks are linked to other squad members such as goalkeeper Franco Armani.
- She says the idea grew from students' craze for swapping World Cup stickers and that by the second exam she saw clearer attention in class and notably better test scores compared with earlier assessments.
- Families and school authorities received the approach positively, and other teachers have asked Rivero for the grading template to try the method in their own classrooms.
- The episode highlights how a culturally rooted, low-cost classroom tweak can boost motivation and how social platforms can quickly spread local teaching practices for informal replication.