Reflections on Teaching in Salvador

I wrote this post last night and it disappeared despite saving it several times so I'm trying to reconstruct it again which is a little bit frustrating. I've been teaching in Santa Teresa for a week and a half now and it's been an interesting, if sometimes difficult experience. There are twenty students on the roster for my class but there are only about 15 or 16 there on any given day. If the parents don't have access to transportation, the kid is not in school that day. If the parent needs the kid to stay home and help with something, the kid is not in school that day. I met one student for the first time yesterday, she had missed school for the previous week and a half.

I find myself constantly amazed and humbled by the attitude and resilience of these kids. They are living in a situation that most of us can never imagine and yet they are always smiling and laughing. They come in to class in the mornings in their threadbare and illfitting school uniforms carrying backpacks that have seen better days and run over to give me a hug and say "bom dia tia" . My nephew has more toys in his bedroom than they have in the whole center. During indoor play time the teacher dumps out a box of well loved toys and the kids play happily with the dinosaur with no leg, the toy phone with no base, the blocks with the pictures rubbed off and the books with some of the pages missing. Their playground area consists of a concrete floor, concrete walls with rust metal gates and grates on the windows and a tin roof. When the kids fall and cut themselves (which they do on a regular basis) they cry for a minute or two and then get right up and rejoin the other kids, and some of us grownups, in chasing each other around.

As I talked about in an earlier post, there are some things that this program does very well. There are however, some parts to it that are very different from what I am used to and parts that I am struggling with. I have always gone into volunteer travel with the understanding that I am not going in to tell people how to do their jobs "better" but rather I am there to serve in whatever way I am needed. I am used to their being cultural differences in the way things are done and I am usually comfortable with accepting those differences and with the fact that although things aren't usually done the way I would do them in my own classroom - that's ok. One area in which I have always struggled to accept these differences is in the use of corporal punishment in the schools. I have worked in several places where it was common to give a misbehaving child a slap on the hand or on the butt. In those places I was able to approach this use of physical punishment with the understanding that I can absolutely hate it and refuse to participate in any way in punishing children in this way but that it's a construct of the culture and I need to live with it.

What I am finding in this school is that the treatment of the kids sometimes goes beyond what I can accept as cultural difference, leaving me in a position of powerlessness. Here corporal punishment is not just a slap on the hand or on the butt, kids who misbehave are often shoved across the room, grabbed and lifted by an arm and pulled across the room or pushed down into the chair. In my classroom in particular, the teacher is downright mean to the kids. She screams on a regular basis (at least 8 -10 times during the 4 hour morning session) and is constantly belittling the kids. Although I don't speak Portuguese, I can understand enough of her words and her tone to know that she is very mean to the kids when they get an answer wrong.

Despite it all the kids seem happy but I can't help but wonder what damage is being done to them long term. It seems as if it's the type of damage that we talk about in the Warner School, that "damage at the level of the soul". As both a teacher and a student I am well aware of the damage that schools can do to children. I also wonder what damage is being done to me as a teacher and as a human being who has to watch this treatment and is powerless to stop it. As one of my colleagues here said, "once you've seen something like that, you can't unsee it". The consensus of any of the English speaking Brazilians that I have spoken to is "oh isn't it funny that she's so loud" - no one seems to think that this behavior is problematic but in my book it crosses a line of decency that for me is immovable, despite the cultural context. All I am able to do is give the kids a quick hug or a pat on the back when she isn't looking - and I'm not sure that's enough.