ELT in Brazil

I’ve said before that I am a teacher at heart. Whenever I get asked to describe myself the very first thing I say, after my name and age (somehow this seems relevant?) is “I am a teacher”. Being a teacher is essential to my identity and I’d be willing to bet that everyone who has met me has realized that from the very first minutes into a conversation.

Despite this, I’ve been away from the classroom for about 4 years and I felt estranged from my natural habitat for too long I began to feel like I was losing this connection with such an important facet of my identity. A teacher who doesn’t teach? Plato said before that all things move towards their rightful place in the cosmos and, if deprived of the possibility of living in their rightful place, the being is bound to feel intense frustration and uneasiness. I felt that last year.

At the end of last year, I decided I had to return to my rightful place in the cosmos and left an office job to get back into the fray – back to school! I found a job at Lumiar Pinheiros, a school with a very particular methodology in which coursebooks are no part of. It sounds as daunting as it is, really. All lessons are to be planned from scratch in a PBL fashion. Naturally, being away from the classroom for about 3 years, I asked my coordinator – and friend – Cintia Rodrigues to observe a couple of my lessons to help me adjust to this methodology. And the results were nothing short of surprising.

Cintia came to two of my lessons of YL. During the feedback session, Cintia commented positively and briefly on my planning, methodology, and execution of the lesson procedures. Pat on the back, way to go. Then, she asked me how I felt my rapport with students was. I thought about it for a second and replied that I believed I had good rapport with the learners. To which she disagreed (!!!). She asked, “Did you notice that during the first lesson, Julia* spent most of the class time UNDER HER TABLE”?

I was in shock. I didn’t. How come I didn’t notice that one of my students spent most of the lesson under her table? The feedback session was dominated by this topic: establishing good rapport with learners. What was I paying attention to if not my learners?

Awareness hit like a truck. As Vinnie likes to say, the unaware lack the necessary awareness to realize they are unaware. I believe I was so adamantly focused on my lesson plan, procedures, teaching techniques, and whatever other technicalities they get you to focus on during CELTA/DELTA that the most important aspect of teaching was ultimately forsaken. And what shocked me the most is that I have written about this before! If you’ve been reading my ‘thoughts-on-docs’ for some time now you’ve probably read the teacher + student = school formula. For some reason, I corrupted the formula I have written myself and turned it into teacher + techniques – learners = ??.

I don’t mean to say that it is CELTA/DELTA’s fault, not at all. This is my own fault and I can only fix this if I own it. I’m writing this post to own it. You know when people say that you’d better look at the half-full cup and focus on the half-full part? I disagree. Clóvis de Barros says that it is only by looking at the half-empty that we can realize the gap in our development. It is only the empty part that can be filled, only the empty part allows room for development. This makes me wonder – What are the other gaps in my teaching that I am too unaware to see?

*fake name