Post-Grad in Brazil
(March 2013) I am now a post-grad student. After a year and a half of waiting for the Educational Psychology program to begin (once they had enough students), it has. Actually, I am late. It started last November, so they have already finished two modules (each class is a month long module).
When working on my undergrad, I was not very impressed with Brazilian private education. In Brazil, you work your butt off to get into a state college, because that is where the good teachers are, and if you pass the entrance exam, college is free. For everyone else, you pay. When I studied, I was in a class of 94 women and 3 men. With a volume level to match. It took half an hour for everyone to sign the attendance sheet. Half the people were late, so starting at 7 meant 7:30, and people did the “rustle your stuff and leave” show from 9-9:30. Have you ever met a Brazilian women? Basic samples show me they are friendly and gossipy. And these were just that. The whole class time. It has to get pretty bad by the time I “shush” them.
Post-grad doesn’t seem to be much better. This module is the “psicopedigogia de desenvolvimento do processo de aprendizagem” which simply means talking about how we learn. Brazilians love the flowery way of saying things. I say cut the crap. The teacher had everyone introduce themselves. About 60 women and 4 men. Why does this ratio haunt me? In two seconds I had identified the class clown, and after I introduced myself to the class, he stood up and loudly sat next to me (still in the middle of class), and began letting me know he had begun taking English classes two weeks ago—this must be fate! I tried politely shushing him in English. It only made him more excited.
The teacher then spent the next hour of class having us write down positive and negative things we felt about the class. This kind of post-grad I can pass. By the time she finally pulled out a syllabus, the class had already argued down the guy who said we needed to be punctual, and cheered me on when I said I looked forward to new ideas people brought. I need to be popular enough that someone will let me into their “group project” when it comes time to present. “group projects” seem to still be code for “One person does all the work and everyone else signs the paper.” I have long given in to this, since everyone knows my Portuguese grammar stinks. All other papers, I do in English and then translate, and turn both copies in. so far, this has gotten me a soild “A” average.
By my 4th class, it was time for a presentation. Since I didn’t do any writing, I told my group I would help present. Since no one from the group showed up, I did it myself. Luckily, it was about Piaget, so I could pull something out of my butt, and do a reasonably decent job of it. I threw in some information from Supercamp, and the whole class was enthralled. They stopped to listen because they thought my accent was cute, but continued listening because it really was good information. And I managed to center everything around passion fruit. Ha. But in all seriousness, I think it was the first time all 65 students were silent for a whole 8 minutes.