LOOKING BACK

This week, a friend of mine, who happens to be a psychologist, asked us if we were that sort of people who made resolutions for the new year. Naturally she said that was fine but the best would be to review the past year and be grateful for all things done or left undone. The new year will bring its own challenges and rewards.

Following her advice let me share with you a little of what my year was like: Of course the sensation is that 2020 hasn’t ended and it will continue with its miseries well into 2022 – but even in the midst of a global pandemic we were able to move house – from a noisy and polluted apartment in the very heart of a metropolis to the clean air of the country – just 130 km away from the city of São Paulo but it feels like its 1,300km away.

The adaptation has been smooth and wonderful… from the very first day we got used to the country – of course, Luther, the cat, took two days to adapt but now he loves his expanded territory. Some drawbacks with a mouse showing up in the laundry area, a snake in the patio and a few frogs in the garden … but all part of nature, right?

Black cat plays with live mouse (short) - YouTube
Apartment cat turns into barn cat in 3 months

The pandemic allowed us to move since I’m working online but it also brought the challenges of companies cutting down expenses and “streamlining” their language teaching benefits offered to their staff. I lost important corporate clients to Covid (they’re still alive, thank goodness – it was economics not viral) but they decided to cut costs and adopt online platforms for employees to self-study instead of using flesh and blood teachers like moi (the future will tell their mistake).

Man Holding A Card With A Text Students Wanted Stock Photo, Picture And  Royalty Free Image. Image 70503076.

My income drop was significant – around 40% of my monthly income suddenly disappeared – while expenses increased because of the new home and maintenance costs of the old apartment. We thought we’d be able to sell it within 6 months but that didn’t happen. Now in 2022 we will try to rent it… great location and size – 3 bedrooms near the financial district of São Paulo – hopefully we will be able to rent it to nice people.

Slowly in June and July I started to get new students to fill the gaps left by the corporate ones … still a long ways to go… but hopefully we will get there.

I still value life quality, more than ever, so I don’t want to be teaching back-to-back classes for 6-8 hours a day. Unhealthy at so many levels.

On the academic level I tried to cut my class times from 60 to 45 minutes – thought they would be more productive – however, at the end of the day, students are paying for 45 minutes of lesson but enjoying 15 minutes more of free English time. Back to the drawing board.

Drawing board - Wikipedia
Back to the drawing board: trial and error

I loved to see my students who stayed on developing and blooming in their confidence when using English – their listening, reading, speaking have improved significantly. Mind you, their writing is not what it should be – partly my fault, because I didn’t push them hard enough to write essays and other sorts of texts. But even so, one of them writes beautiful academic articles (can I call them beautiful?). Writing is also the least favorite activity among my learners. My chest was stuffed with pride when my student got band 7 on IELTS having studied less than 3 weeks for the exam.

Will 2014 be the year you pass your IELTS? |

On another professional level, as a remote interpreter – I attended a very good course this year at Associação Alumni to learn more about the new world of remote interpreting, the resources, techniques and gadgets – while also networking with the teachers and classmates – remotely, of course. I am a pretty reserved person so networking is a challenge for me – but one must try. Looking forward to developing a more relevant profile as a remote English, Spanish and Portuguese interpreter in 2022.

ODP-Video Remote Interpreting Tips

Yes, 2021 was a tough cookie to chew (almost as hard as the Christmas cookies my flower baked, please don’t tell her), but it had its many surprises, even with me in December becoming a choir conductor – bear in mind I had never done that before and my musical education is limited to say the least. But that’s life… full of surprises – some pleasant , others not, but always contributing to growth.

My debut as a choir conductor

Happy New Year and looking forward to seeing you on the other side.

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Cheers

Mo

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English Language Education in Brazil – An Outlook – Part 1

Last Monday I attended a talk sponsored by Braz-Tesol (Brazilian Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) and Marcelo Barros presented a brief but content-loaded overview of the situation of the language teaching outlook in Brazil today.

 

The language education market in Brazil is extremely fragmented lacking official associations that would really represent the interests of English teachers around the country. Braz-Tesol and state organizations such as Apeoesp (Association of Teachers of São Paulo state schools) or Apliesp (Association of Teachers of English in the State of São Paulo) represent a small percentage of teachers.

The fragmentation of the English language teaching industry:

university

private schools

state-run school

municipal schools

binational language institutes

independent language schools

self-employed teachers

How do they see each other? As in any market economy, they see each other as competitors, but not only that, the University educators look down on all the other teachers as if they were a lower form of life.  Also teachers working at languages schools or institutes look down on teachers in state or city-run schools, as not even knowing English  themselves and how can they be able to teach it? State-run teachers also see independent language schools as the death knell for the teaching of languages in regular classrooms. Binational language centres as the British Council, Cultura Inglesa or Alumni, also look down on independent language schools as unprepared to teach given that the former emphasise native speakers as teachers and the latter would have to resort to humble Brazilians trying to make a living.

The reality is that English teachers at language schools or self-employed have been imparting knowledge to millions around the country, making up for a huge gap in the education level provided by regular grammar schools at all levels.

The Brazilian Association of Franchising – ABF, estimates that 2-4% of Brazilians speak some English – which creates a significant linguistic elite in a country with around 220 million people.

The Brazilian economic boom decade between 2002 and 2012 also represented a bonanza for language teaching, with a peak in the number of people studying English in Brazil.

It is estimated that today there are little under 1 million people studying English in Brazil. But why do so few people study that language? Why is there such a high dropout rate?

To be continued… .