Frustration and me is a relationship that never gets watered down. I walked into my turma's classroom during the time reserved for meeting with the director of the turma (me) and found a teacher starting a lesson. He was very surprised and seemed patronizingly upset that I actually wanted to do anything with the turma. The kids complained, too, until I gave them an outlet for their frustrations via some "chefes" specific for complaining to me. (This is MOM -- I have no idea what that sentence really means....)
The main beef was that the English teacher was marking their notebooks in large letters and tearing out pages from their notebooks if the homework wasn't present. As I know how they like to exaggerate, I said I'd talk to the teacher, fully intending to do so.
So I found Vincente and asked him what was going on. This is the same teacher I was with for the oral exams. He immediately got defensive and wondered why I was taking their side of it. I was tempted to drop it, but got him to explain what was really going on. Apparently, when a student doesn't do their homework, he writes a big "H" on the page so that he can total up the Hs at the end of the trimester. And the students, in order to counteract it, rip the pages out of their notebooks. I made the point that Vicente doesn't want them ripping pages out and THEY don't want to be ripping pages out, so there must be another solution. He agreed, asking me for that solution. So I suggested that he make a mark on the inside cover. If he receives a book without an inside cover, he could give a zero. His response was dismissingly "That won't work. They'll just find a way around it. I've been doing this since 2001. If you come up with a solution, we'll see." It reminded me of being 13 years old again. Not that my solution was the end all, but I'm trying to solve a problem and help him out. So I'm going to come up with 5 solutions, in detail.
I figured out what I feel is the theory of education here. One day, people who are very rich and powerful arrive with books. They say that the books are sacred. People relaying the information from these books, as there are limited copies, become known as teachers. The point is to relay the information. Then the books start becoming different, and teachers can only read one or two of the books. Thus, my students scoff at variation; and my insistence that teaching is giving the tools to learn, and not just information.
Peace
John
