It’s hard to believe that we’re already in the third week of classes here at EduAction – São Paulo edition (1.0). For some of my classes, that is – one of the schools here has their first class this week! To give you a rough overview of where the EduAction impact will be here in São Paulo, here’s a rough overview of the schools where I’ll be teaching.
CEU Butatã:
If there ever was a model for public school education in Brazil, this school would be in the running for top 10. With a swimming pool, computer lab, theater group, chess club, and enthusiastic teachers, this school is almost too cool for itself.
My classes here are the biggest but also the most organized. I’m teaching as a “guest lecturer” for Rosana, a geography teacher, as part of her 8th grade classes’ globalization unit. As with all my classes, we have class once a week. There are four different sections that I teach, each with about 25 kids, so about 100 kids worth impact at this school – my biggest audience overall. I teach here on Mondays and Tuesdays.
This class is the farthest along in terms of our time-line – we’re already in our third week – Entrepreneurship!
We’ve already covered our Intro class, where the students built Expectation cubes (origami paper cubes that hold 6 goals). We’re going to use these in our last class to drive a discussion on personal goal setting. Last week was our class on Cultural Diversity where students were challenged to trade amonst themselves without speaking Portuguese – a lesson in “cross – cultural” communication. More on this week in an upcoming post!
Overall, this school has been really easy to work with. The only issues have been a decided lack of ability to show any videos or powerpoints, but I think that this limitation has forced me to make the classes more dynamic. So a good thing, after all.
Brasil – Japão
Considered a bit of a challenging teaching environment, Brasil – Japão is probably closer to a real Brazilian public school than CEU. Every teacher at CEU Butatã wants to know if B-J is as disorganized as they’ve heard. TO their credit, the teachers and staff at B-J have been incredibly supportive and welcoming to the EduAction project, and the kids that were selected to participate seem really motivated. However, the few times that I’ve been there, I can’t help shake the feeling that this school is mostly run by the kids.
I have three classes here: 1 with 5th and 6th graders, 1 with 7th and 8th graders, and one night class with adults. The classes are run during the same time as their regular classes. The BJ administrators selected students that they thought would benefit the most from participating in EduAction, so I get to steal them from class for one period during the school day.
It’s just me in these classes, so I feel a lot of pressure to keep the kids focused on learning the material. We had our first class here last week, our Intro class. The start was a bit rocky, as the classroom I’m using didn’t have a blackboard, but the kids really seemed to like making their own expectation cubes – they were sad about having to turn them back into me at the end of the class. This week we’ll be covering Cultural Diversity.
This school is running the farthest behind schedule out of all of my classes. I’m going to have just one class, during the morning because the students have their regular classes during the afternoon. In this school, the EduAction project is going to be just with 5th graders, and will be run like an extracurricular program, outside of the regular school day. My first class will be here on Wednesday of this week (tomorrow!), and I’m excited about meeting my last class.
