I’ve never met Neyda Martinez, but I know Bronx Leadership Academy — we played them in girls basketball quite often — and I remember asking the coach about the college process for one of their players. I was told, "Oh, we have an amazing college counselor here. She’s really on top of it." Until I read this article in today’s New York Times, I had no idea just how on top of it she was.

Neyda Martinez of the Bronx Leadership Academy was visited by her daughter, Bennell La Porte, a college student home on break, at the hospital.

Now, as Ms. Martinez, a 54-year-old guidance counselor, lies in a bed at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx waging a struggle with cancer, she is so firm about education that she will not even let her daughter, Bennell La Porte, a 20-year-old junior at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, come home to New York to nurse her.

"I give the same advice to my daughter that I give all my students about a college education: Go away," Ms. Martinez said. "Even if it is only three hours from the city, you will come back a changed person. You will see the world differently."

Ms. Martinez, a teacher in the New York City public school system for 23 years, made it her mission to get students to college. "I tell my students, ‘Never say you can’t make it,’ " she said, smiling, trying to shake a fist in her weakened condition. "If you set a goal, and you show up at this school every single day and work, you will make it."

She sounds like an amazing person and teacher, and I know she’ll be there to see her daughter graduate college.