Being A Part of A Community

One of the first things that I did when I got to UEL (the University I work at) was to join a Portugues For Foreign Learners class. I met people from all over the world, but mostly from South America. I am currently taking my second Portugues class, and I have met people from: Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Iran, Hungary, Haiti, and Morocco. In addition, I attend the monthly Intercultural Cafe, which has allowed me to reach out to people studying at UEL from even more countries across the world. 

One of my classmates, Daniela, asked me to participate in a poem reading for one of the Master's classes. She sculpted a video that highlights the differences and beauty that we all bring to UEL with our languages. In the video, we all read the same people, except in a cascading effect in our language. It was really breathtaking to hear the differences in languages. 

From left to right:

Romania- Argentina- Spanish

Brazil- Portugues

Daniela- Venezuela- Spanish

Dominique- Haiti- French

Andrea- Hungary- Hungarian

Me- USA- English

Claire- France- French 

Intercultural Cafe

Every month one of the programs at Universidade Estudual de Londrina is called Intercultural Cafe. This brings together students of different nationalities that are studying on campus and gives us the opportunity to connect and learn from each other. This past month's theme was Festa Junina, which consisted on a small history lesson, a game of Kahoot to test our knowledge, and attempting to dance the qaudrillo. Enjoy our crazy attempt!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0N9ZndwgKc&t=21s

Tenho Saudades

February 23 to May 23. Three months have passed since my first day in Brasil, and I haven’t nearly come closer to blending in, speaking Portuguese fluently, or being very confident with navigating all cultural situations, but I sure have come a long way.

Tenho saudades- a phrase I heard as one set of Fulbrighters were leaving Brasil, and I was preparing to go. I had no idea what it meant, but now it’s a phrase that hits home everyday (pun intended). I long for and I miss so many things from home, and I mean other than the obvious choices of my family, friends, and pets. There are some things in Brasil that I never realized I would encounter living without, and others I didn’t mentally prepare for.

Indoor heating- Before coming to Brasil, I of course checked the average weather for my city throughout the months that I would be in Londrina. I was ecstatic to see that the low for their winter is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Fall is my favorite season, so seeing that the fall, winter, and spring months would all be temperate made me very happy. UNTIL, the colder days of fall hit. Suddenly, the temperature shifted- all in one weekend. It feels like there are three or four months in one day. The mornings drop to about 48 degrees Fahrenheit, and require some sort of jacket, and drop again to this temperature at night, but rise to 75 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit throughout some days. Other days, it will stay chilly at 65 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The thing is- it’s always cold. There is no way to escape the chilly temperature by going into a building, because the buildings don’t have heat and they’re just as cold. I regret not bringing more sweatshirts or a pair of sweatpants.

Air conditioning- Normally, I’m the type of girl who likes to spoil herself with this, when I can. Whenever I have the opportunity to use AC, I take it. My first few weeks in Londrina were awful at night, and I caved in to buy a fan just so that I could sleep through the night. The 80 reais were worth the comfort of not being perpetually sticky in my room.

Having a car- It’s very easy to fall into a lul of comfort of having a car to easily get around town. Need to go grocery shopping? That’s easy to go across town and then pack the grocery bags into your trunk. Need to get to the university campus on a time schedule? You can leave whenever you need to. This privilege is something I forgot was just that- a privilege. Learning to navigate and take the public transportation has been a challenge. Buses may run late, or not pass through certain places on weekends. You always need small bills, and anything over 5 reais will be followed with an eye roll or sigh from the bus driver.

A dryer- I’m lucky enough that my apartment has a washer, just to begin with that plus side, but I’ve started to get used to hanging everything and waiting the day for it to dry. The nice feeling of burying myself under a pile of warm laundry isn’t an option, and some days it can be so frustrating to have to wait for the clothes to dry, especially as the temperature outside and inside the house decreases.

Being able to communicate easily in hard situations- Although I have not cried in a public place since my first month here, like when I broke down in the Vivo phone store, I have had difficult situations since then when I wanted to shut down and turn off. Only having mastered a few verbs in present and past tense makes it very hard to follow conversations and communicate effectively. When I’m asking for directions, get asked something by a store clerk, or am confronted by tasks when I need to immediately and quickly follow a conversations an answer then I stress out. I never realized how a small task could turn into a challenge with this one small change.

Although I do miss a lot of things, I keep reminding myself that today does mark ⅓ of the completion of my Fulbright experience and I tell myself that I need to cherish things rather than focusing on what I miss. 3 months out of 9 completed and I still have so many goals to accomplish, things to see, and lessons to teach.

First University Classes Assisted!

My students are beyond amazing and better than I could have ever asked for. You know that they break your expectations of adorableness when a students says, “I’ve seen this on American tv so many times and I knew this was my chance”, and proceeds to hand me an apple. In order to celebrate my student’s first ever class in oral production, I stayed up until midnight and then two hours the next morning baking cookies. Baking without USA measuring cups was a challenged, and I apologized profusely to my students that they probably tasted different than normal. Their faces lit up when they saw the cookies, and my night class went back for seconds.

Every Friday I assist in teaching two sections of oral production for freshman English Education students. Meaning- my students are studying to be English teachers, and I get to help them improve their fluency and confidence in the language. There are four of us Fulbrighters at UEL, and each of us is assigned a grade level for the course. The freshman class is the largest, meaning that I get to work with about 40 students between two classes. The classes are set up as 1.75 hour chunks, and there is an afternoon and night session (2 pm and 7:15 pm).

It’s interesting how many of my students stated that their reason for choosing the major is because they either 1. Loved English and have studied it a lot of their life or 2. Want to learn English. In a way, this is similar to a lot of English Education majors I met in my program who started the degree track because of their love for English, but eventually switched out of the Education track.

Our first class we spent some time doing icebreakers and getting to know you questions, which helped me to gage the students’ personalities and English levels. They are so spunky, and I was so impressed by the level of humor that they’re already able to include in their responses. My night class had a running joke about being single and loving cats, and we decided that blind dates are definitely necessary to set up almost the whole class haha!

I am a bit nervous about working with two different professors for the class. Both classes are based on the same syllabus, except my afternoon professor seems to want to incorporate a lot of texts, and my night professor is keen to follow a certain textbook. It does make me worried that I might get strung out from lesson planning two different curriculum. As well, I haven’t received an answer yet as to how I’ll fit into the class- whether it be creating an opening activity, or just adding to what the professor creates. I’m hoping that the next few weeks will help to lay that out.

My students are working on their biography and autobiography unit, which leaves a lot of wiggle room for activities like- headbanz, coffee house speed dating, classmate bingo, and other small activities that can be infused to introduce more adjectives and descriptive vocabulary. I’m hoping to plan a lot of group activities to get them up and talking. As well, I’ve begun collecting information on my students to gage their levels, goals, and backgrounds, and I hope to incorporate a variety of multiple intelligences in my activity so that I can collect feedback about how they best learned oral production skills.

It may be a lot of work, and things still may not be set up, but I love it. My students make it worth it everyday. My goal is to show my students how great their abilities already are, to improve their confidence, and show them that as they’re learning English- I’m learning Portuguese. It’s a joint process. I made sure the first day to emphasize that I’m not there to judge them. When I shared some of my recent mistakes (for example louca-crazy for louça-dishes) they laughed. I can’t wait to share more laughs and jokes with my students as we learn.

Minor Setbacks

As I exit the honeymoon phase of being in Brasil, after being here for three weeks, I’m really starting to see that not everything is rainbows and butterflies. Most things have been great, especially the food and my town, Londrina, but we’re hitting some bumps currently. For example, the Federal Police changed the registration law just as I was coming to Brasil, and I may now not have documents that I need in order to avoid the fine and register. Any person staying in a Brasilian town for an extended amount of time is required to check in with the Federal Police, pay money, and check a bunch of paperwork signed off on. I prepared for notarized passport copies, paying the fee…. But I did not anticipate needing the original copy of my birth certificate to get notarized. As well, when I tried to sign up for the Federal Police appointment online it only gave me one option in the pull down bar, and only one time, which was May 25th. I need to be registered within three months of entering Brasil, and this May date exceeds that. I’m starting to get a bit anxious about that.

A short theory lesson on how I understand Brasilian Universities work. There are two major university categories that you can choose from- public and private. In opposition to how the USA school systems work, public universities are harder to get into but free and private universities are easier to get into but costs thousands of dollars. In order to get into public universities you need to take a “vestibular” test specific to each university, and I have not met any student who passed it on the first try because it is very difficult. The public universities receive their funding almost solely from the government, because they are free of cost to the students, and it looks like a lot of the campus buildings have not received much renovation since they were built.

UEL,Universidade Estadual Londrina, the university that I am teaching at, is a public university. Specifically, I am working with the letras department and english education major students. UEL seems to be going through a series of strikes due to funding cuts, which my friend says he experienced since 2015 when he attended UEL. The most current strike ended as I was arriving in Londrina, and I was hoping that UEL would quickly get back on track. This, unfortunately does not seem to be the case. With so much time off filter with the strike, UEL staff members and professors are still trying to get back on their feet. Orientation was supposed to begin March 19th and classes March 26th, but today we received a bulletin that the beginning of the term will be suspended. Translated from the Portuguese post, “In a bulletin sent to faculty, undergraduates and technical-administrative staff on the night of this Saturday (17), the Rector of UEL informs that it is suspending the beginning of the academic calendar of graduation of 2018, scheduled for this Monday, March 19.”

At this point, we’re not sure when we’ll be beginning classes, I’m not sure what teacher I will be assisting in classes, and a lot of things will be up in the air for a while. Plus, this means that I don’t know when the second Portuguese class that I want to take will begin. I would say it’s stressful, but a lot of this is out of my control, and I realize that, so I’m trying to make the best of it and I’m still going to help out on campus as much as I can.

http://www.uel.br/com/agenciaueldenoticias/index.php?arq=ARQ_not&FWS_Ano_Edicao=1&FWS_N_Edicao=1&FWS_Cod_Categoria=2&FWS_N_Texto=25985

Picking My Independent Project and Meeting Staff!

After the weekend ended, the business of Fulbright began. I started my first weekday with a run around the lake, without getting lost! Lara, Bennie, and I took an uber to UEL, as to make sure we weren’t too late from trying to bus our first day. There we met Michele, our host professor! It was so exciting to have clarity on the University’s expectations and plan for us. It was frustrating that Fulbright never forwarded on the written outlined plans for us ETAs that Michele made, but we finally found out. It is an awesome balance between classroom Teaching assistant time and also developing a side project to collaborate with students and staff members. Immediately, I was drawn to the idea of working with the international education office, but Michele also mentioned the opportunity to volunteer in a local public school. You can imagine how happy I was. I did a little happy dance in my seat. To get to work with four of my loves- international education, postsecondary education, English, and secondary students…. My heart was ready to explode. There are four of us ETAs at UEL, and Michele cleverly thought to divide us up to each work with one grade level, and I claimed the freshman students. Working with lower level students during my student teaching made me realize how much I truly love the moments when students have breakthroughs. It might not be as often, and it might take longer, but their expression of making the connection to the material is what makes teaching one of the best careers.

In addition, Michele organized for us ETAs to meet the director for international education at UEL. I, of course, was in my glory listening to all of the opportunities I could get involved in to help welcome, track, and maintain a relationship with international students. I’m not sure if I will go the career route of working postsecondary in international education, but I definitely want to see the perspective from another school system abroad.

A quick side note- my host professor also told us that she wants to encourage us to participate in teaching and educational conferences across Brazil with her, meaning traveling to Belem and Salvador possibly!! I loved presenting at conferences while in University, but I’m a bit nervous for if I were to present in Brasil, and whether it would have to be in Portuguese. It’s a goal to work towards, and I very much hope that I can share my research on Educational Disparities in the USA to show that the USA isn’t always as “rainbows and butterflies” as some Brasilians think it is. It’s true that the phrase “the grass is always green on the other side” carries a lot of weight here, even around the world really.

OH! So, my campus has monkey on it around the Calcedon, main street through campus. My friends warned me not to try and cuddle the monkeys, which wasn’t a thought of mine to begin with, but they still told me to keep my distance. The ETA group plus Michele were walking between buildings and suddenly we were surrounded by monkeys! They started dropping from the trees, surrounding us, bared their teeth, and stood around us like a small monkey mafia. We got away without being touched by them, but I didn’t believe the stories that the monkeys make a menace around campus.