The Thing I Carried

(with apologies to Tim O'Brien)

This morning, the first object I saw when I woke up was a large crystal ball on my bedside table.  In that strange place between sleep and wakefulness, between staying in my bed and rising to meet the insistent demands of cats that wanted to be fed and dogs that needed to be walked, I focused my eyes on the little bubbles that float eternally inside it like miniature planets in a tiny solar system.  What I saw was more than an object.  Memories are captured in that sphere.

Of course, the first and greatest of the memories is of where I got it.  Rita's public school, David Campista, was one of the best parts of the "homestay" to me.  The head principal started taking care of us even before we arrived, helping Rita get us to and from the airport in Campinas, three hours away from Pocos.  Rita also told us that Leone had assisted her in planning our trip itinerary.

Our day at David Campista included all sorts of student presentations where we got to see all the wonderful talents the students there had.  We saw elementary school kids dancing to pop music, high school students presenting information about their hometown and their nation, and even a rap group that is in competition for a recording contract.  There were guitarists and singers, dancers of every conceivable style.  Even the walls of the school itself presented, banner projects made by one of the English classes describing the scenic and historic places in Pocos in English hung everywhere.

Both before and after the evening presentation, we found ourselves in a roundtable discussion about education with the teachers from the night shift.  They were curious about so many things, our class size, our salary, what our supervisory system and system of evaluation were like.  They wanted to know as much about us as American educators as we had come to Brazil wanting to know about them.  We talked and talked until long after the hours for the regular school session had ended.

At the very end of it, they brought out two beautifully-wrapped packages.  We opened them, and as the picture will show you, a beautiful crystal globe awaited each of us.  Pocos is known for its cristalarias, its makers of fine crystal and murano glass.  We'd seen someone making tiny crystal animals at a crafts pavilion at a waterfall we'd visited; we'd been to one of the large showrooms downtown for one of the companies.  I personally had been wanting to buy a beautiful paperweight, had been wanting one for a long, long time.  I never expected to own anything as lovely as this one, though.  The size of a small melon, it sat in my cupped palms once I got it out of its protective wrappings, for all the worlds like a sphere full of rushing river water that had somehow become solid.  I knew that every time I saw it, I would think of my trip to Brazil and all the kindness I had received, of all I had learned and experienced.

Getting anything that large and fragile home becomes a challenge.  It rode in a special tote bag carry-on during the two plane rides I would take to get back to the United States, snugged in its bubble wrap and nestled next to my other great fragile treasure, my Nikon.  It was one of the first things I unpacked when I finally got everything in the house.  It will probably go to school with me when the new year begins.  Meanwhile, it sits softly gleaming where it is one of the last things I see when I go to bed and one of the first when I start my day.

Presentations

In many of the schools we visited in Pocos, we were treated to presentations by the students.  The students had apparently been preparing for our arrival for quite some time, and one day at Integral, a private school, we had a third year class of students do PowerPoints, sing, and present.  One of the younger classes had dancers, girls who are taking classes and choreographing their own routines.  We watched some of middle school students learning dances for their Festa Junina.   Because of the rules of the school, I don't have any pictures from there.  They asked us not to shoot pictures, and we were respectful of that.

Later in the week, we went to David Compista, Rita's public school, and her classes gave us a day of presentations including songs, dances including the traditional forms and freestyle, information about Pocos and Brazil through PowerPoint, and in the night session, rap.  It was wonderful to see all the talents the students had to share with us.  Ali and I each filmed and took pictures as much as possible, and I'm still working on getting all the video off my Bloggie and processed.

I want to be able to show my students how much they have in common with the students I met in Brazil.  I think they will particularly love the rap and freestyle dancing although they will undoubtedly find all of it interesting.  To me, it just goes to reinforce the idea that there are beautiful similarities that exist as a baseline for communication between those students and my own.  Too often, I think my kids think of everybody else, and not necessarily just those in another nation or speakers of another language, as people they have no possible connection with.  When they see people playing the guitar with passion or rapping or dancing or whatever it is that they themselves enjoy doing, I hope they are going to have that precious "A-ha!" moment where they begin to see commonality and points of connection instead of barriers.

As soon as I conquer a few cross-account problems, I will get the videos up here.

Language Center Conversations

For our last visit in Pocos, we went to a language center night session.  There were perhaps 11 students and three teachers in a small room.  I did my Mississippi presentation, and then we started a question-and-answer session with the students.

The questions they asked us and that we asked of them led to some very thought-provoking discussions.  One of the students had lived in the US until very recently.  Two of the teachers had been educated at least partially in the US.  When we talked about the differences between US and Brazilian schools, they were outspoken in their opinions and desires.  Two of them expressed a desire to go back.  Several of the other students expressed a desire to go to the US as well.

They expressed how much they missed certain things the US system has that are not in the Brazilian system such as extracurricular activities, and almost every student commented on the differences in education at public and private schools in Brazil.  They were frustrated and vocal.  We sat and listened, asked questions, pondered.

I came away from the discussion with an expanded understanding of student life in Brazil.  They emphasized what we'd been hearing again and again since we arrived, wrapped it almost like a vignette of the whole trip in that one room.  I will continue to turn these students' and teachers' comments over in my mind as I think about everything I have seen here.

Mountain Music and Monkeys

(or...yesterday continued)

After we left the vineyard, we bumped along for quite awhile and finally emerged in a tiny town that consisted of many houses, a church, the school, and not a whole lot else.  Everything was clean and tidy, and the school was a lovely shade of lime green.  It was clearly a place that, although it might not have a whole lot, cared for what it did possess.

From the minute we entered the doors of the school in Campestrinho, we were surrounded with people who wanted to speak to us, see us, experience us.  It was amazing.  We went to almost every classroom, looked in, said hi just as we have been doing, but here we saw lower elementary school children.  They were so full of curiosity about us.  They crowded into the doors of the classrooms we weren't watching to see if we were coming to them next.  In every class, there was one brave soul who would try to say something in English.  They were precious.

Quite unexpectedly, we were also treated to an entire performance of a guitar orchestra.  They sang traditional Brazilian folk music and played.  It was wonderful.  They were very talented.  Everywhere we've been, music has greeted us.  It is such a lovely thing to have as a welcome, and it is also great to see students so deeply tied to the arts.

We stayed for awhile, and then we went back to Andradas to visit a large rural/urban school there.  It reminded me so much of my high school for some reason.  Maybe it was the way the kids behaved.  Maybe it was some of the problems they were having.  For whatever reason, it felt homelike to me.

When we finally got back to town, we took a tour to the Fountain of the Lovers.  It  is a famous landmark here in Poços de Caldas, but we were hoping to see the monkeys that live there as much as the lush scenery.    When we arrived, all but one of the monkeys were gone.  The lone little creature sat in his tree and sang to us.  We talked to him, and he deigned to swing down and pose for some pictures (quite literally, pose).  We bought a couple of bananas, and he became much more active.  We learned we could feed him by hand.  He would delicately walk forward and pluck the bits of banana from our outstretched palms, carefully watching us the whole time for signs of trechery.  He was amazing.

Eventually, after two bananas, he decided to share the wealth, and he called for one of his friends or family.  Another came, we bought some more bananas, and we kept on feeding them.  It was a truly fantastic afternoon, like something out of a tourist guide book.  After the monkeys decided they were through with us, we hiked up to see the fountain, and it was lovely.  I will get some pictures processed soon.

We came back down the hill and to our hotel.  It had been a very long and mixed day.  From dirt roads and wine to guitars and metal-roofed schools to monkeys and marble fountains, yesterday had a bit of everything in it.  It was all good.

M - I - Crooked Letter - Crooked Letter- I....

After lunch today, we came back to the Elefante Brancho campus to the CIEL language school.  Here German, Spanish, French, and English are taught as foreign languages.  We were there to give short presentations about some aspect of American culture to the English classes that were meeting in the evening.

We took our mandatory tour, listened to the welcome presentation, and it was all very good, but the whole time, my mind was on the students.  This whole trip, more and more, my heart has been turning back to EFL and how much I loved doing it, how great it was to be an EFL teacher.  I could not wait to be in the class and meet the students, to see what they were like, to watch them work with their target language.

We were ushered in pairs to our respective classes, and our group of students was fantastic.  They were interactive.  They were not afraid to ask questions.  They laughed at and with us, which was to be expected and was a great relief.  Nothing is worse than a class that doesn't laugh when I'm trying to be amusing.  They were tolerant of technology glitches.  It was great.

Just like teens everywhere, they were intensely curious about life in my country.  I have never met a teenager who wasn't curious.  This is what makes the problems we're having with education everywhere such a mystery to me.  Teens want to know EVERY FREAKING THING.  How can we get them to realize that school is the place to scratch that itch?  How can we change what we are doing in schools to channel that natural need they have to know into a the beneficial need to know everything?

I could have stayed there with them for hours.  I was having that much fun.  Nothing energizes me faster than a responsive class.  They had business to attend to, though, and we needed to get out of the way.  We left, all bright and cheerful, chatty about our visits, happy as a flock of little teaching larks with our brief encounter.  I don't know what they got out of it, but I hope they took something positive other than just hearing a native speaker talk.  I hope in some way, even if it was only learning the childhood song I used for the title of this post about spelling Mississippi, some learning came from it.  It would be unfair if all the good in the encounter was just on my side of the desk.

Public/Private

Yesterday, we spent most of the day at Elefante Brancho, one of the best public schools in the city of Brasilia.  We did classroom observations, talked with faculty and staff, interacted with the students, took a class tour, and even wound up in their auditorium in front of a packed house of teachers and students answering eager questions about everything from teacher salaries to how political our student organizations were.  The students of Elefante Brancho (which does indeed mean White Elephant) were just like my own students back home, bright and intelligent, interested in their friends and popular music, in love with their cell phones.  It felt so familiar despite the linguistic barrier.

The teachers were a little apologetic about their school.  It was built a long time ago, and things here and there might have shown that.  To me, though, coming from a school built in 1938, what I saw instead was how well they have taken what they have and made it attractive and student-centered.  While they have security cameras in the halls for safety, they also have beautiful murals on the walls spray painted by students.  Student art was everywhere:  collage, paintings, drawings glued to doors.  The students could feel real ownership.  It was something that was theirs, not simply a facility they were passing through.  They were also given time to decompress, breaks in which they were not herded from place to place, but rather given time to talk, use their cell phones, be more like adults.  To me, this was reflected in their behavior.

Today, we visited the Marista high school, one of the two best private schools here in Brasilia.  It was astounding.  I have seen colleges with worse campuses.  Everything was bright and clean, airy and well-kept.     It was very obvious that money had been spent on its maintenance.  Nothing was ornate or ostentatious, but the science labs were stocked with computers even we don't have. The teachers were happy, satisfied, had been competitive to get in, in fact.  The students were engaged, active, curious about us.  We talked with their student government leaders, visited with their lead teachers.  Again and again, they spoke to us of the importance of building relationships with their students to ensure they could be academically successful.

Both the public and the private school teachers talked to us about the disparity between the experience teaching and attending a public school versus a private one.  It came up again and again.  Looking back through my pictures, although I can definitely see the differences in the facilities, when I look at the students and think about our experiences with them, all I can see, to be honest, are faces of bright young Brazilians who want to find the best for themselves and their country.  That foundation of similarity is a strong thing to build upon no matter what school created it.