Happy Easter!

For Easter there were various cultural events around Santa Teresa (my neighbourhood, see pic), including a carnival 'bloco' yesterday afternoon - the Carioca love carnival so much they can't help spreading it across the whole year! The whole thing was a wonderful, and so Brazilian, mixture of sacred and profane, of religious and pagan... The crowd following the musicians, singing salacious carnival tunes, was in gaudy outfits and wearing plastic crowns of thorns on their heads... with, in the background, arty projections of the passion of Christ and famous representations of it... all this washed down with beer and sweat... wonderful!

Flashback - week 3 - Projeto Morrinho

On that week, Leonardo arrived determined to show a documentary about TV Morrinho to the kids. I am not sure he knew exactly what he wanted to do with this material, which questions and discussions he wanted to trigger among the students, and I blame him for that. We could have used this material a lot better had we been prepared for it.

Projeto Morrinho is a really great project, started a few years ago by teenagers from a small favela in Rio. The kids started building miniature models of the favela using bricks and found material, and using them as the set for games in which they reproduced situations from their everyday life in the favela. Their models got noticed and attracted the attention of designers, artists and documentary makers who helped them to create an NGO and show their work outside the favela. The transformation of what started as a game, a joke, into a work of art in its own right, culminated in the Venice Biennale 2007, where the boys from Morrinho project showed a huge model of a favela. There are pictures of the models here on flickr.

The documentary we showed during our classes retraces the history of the project and shows the boys travelling around Europe to show their models at art shows and exhibitions.

For me this project is interesting because it shows the power of inventiveness and creativity. It shows that anyone, whatever their environment and their cultural background can find the means and ways to express themselves through art in a way that's revealing and interesting to the world. On the other hand, you can argue that the favela is such a laden topic, the symbol of social inequality, drug trafficking and the failure of democracy in Brazil, and the entire world, that any representation of it is bound to be interesting to the middle class and to find its way to our TV sets and art galleries...

an improvised French class at playtime

Flashback - week 2 - in which I am called a French witch

The second week was by far the hardest. The kids didn't trust us yet and were clearly testing us. We started teaching on Thursday morning under a rain of paper balls and finished on Friday afternoon, exhausted, after having had to separate two students fighting during the class. We spent most of our time trying to discipline the kids, failing, and losing our temper. I lost mine many times and became really hard and strict with the kids as a result - and became known as the French terrorist witch among the students!

The real problem was that we weren't ready. We hadn't prepared our classes and this is a mistake no teacher should make. We all knew that, and yet it seemed impossible to get everyone to sit down and decide on the content of classes at least for that week. The reason for this is still a mystery to me. Were we scared of suggesting ideas to the group? Was it the fear of planning something totally inappropriate that was paralysing us? Personally, I felt that I really needed to sit down with everyone to discuss my ideas and get them approved by them. I had tons of ideas but felt really insecure as to whether they would be appropriate for the kids, and rightly so. I barely knew them, barely knew the kind of life they lead, the kind of place they live in and kind of education they have, at home and at school.

Roger and Anderson - our first photography lesson...

Flashback - week 1

Week one was a bit of an anti-climax... After all the talking, philosophising, theorising, dreaming, fantasizing we'd done about the project, reality couldn't really live up to expectations... And it was just as well, we needed to get our feet back on the ground. Reading Vigotsky, Foucault and Gramsci was enlightening, but it couldn't help us to deal with the realities of the school.

I arrived half-way through the week to find the school in total chaos: general start-of-year clean up. All students, parents and teachers were supposed to help cleaning and doing the school up, but in fact, the only ones working were us - the teachers sent by the UFRJ-mar project. And there was a lot of work to do, there still is. I helped reorganising the library, others did heavier work like breaking toilets, walls, replacing broken roof tiles, painting... Basically, the school's got so little money that it can't afford to pay anyone to do all this, and has to rely on voluntary work. The library is still being relocated and so is the computer room - so for the moment there's no computer and no internet in the school for us to use. But there will be at some point soon, and I intend to create a blog or a website with some of my students...

After a couple of days of cleaning up we finally got to start the academic year, to start teaching. The first classes were spent asking the students about themselves, what they liked and what they had done last year in PCSA (communication and art, my subject) - film, newspaper, theatre... None of them seemed to have found last year's projects particularly exciting, most couldn't remember what they had done and when they could, only had criticisms to make.... Hm, encouraging, is that what I want them to be like at the end of the year?? It basically seemed like they hadn't taken anything away from lats year's PCSA classes and weren't that bothered about it... First blow to our initial enthusiasm. But it's ok, students are like this we were told, they usually don't realise that they're learning...

I teach five classes, of all levels - ages from 11 to 14-15 years old. There are about 30 kids in each class. 150 names to remember. Plus the staff. Ouch! I still don't know all of their names, and still mix Maique up with Mairone, Cleyton with Uilson, Kettelen with Karoline. We've also got a Victor Hugo, a Roger Walker, a Kennedy, a Washington and an Elvis... the list is endless, they've all got extremely inventive names!

with Anderson in front of the school

picture taken by Roger - turma 901

I'm late!

Yes I'm late. I've been working in the school - Colegio Municipal dos Pescadores - for 6 weeks already but I'm only starting this blog today. It's not that I haven't felt the need to write about all this until today, on the contrary. It's that starting at the school has been rather overwhelming! The kids, the heat, the dirt, the mess, the lack of organisation... you'll understand what I mean soon, I'm afraid these will be recurring themes of this humble diary... which aspires only - I should really make this clear now - to serve as therapy for me, and to offer you a more regular and detailed update on my life here...