05/05/10

This morning two of the girls-in-training at the mission were teaching some songs to the students in preparation for May 24th which is Maria Auxiliadora day. They had passed out sheets of paper with the song lyrics (some of the songs are in Portuguese, some are in Txitxopi) to all of the students and practiced singing each of them. When the school director commented on how most of the students weren’t singing, my colleague which whom I was standing, who is a Portuguese teacher, said to me, “that’s because most of them can’t read.” And that is the terrible irony I encounter when I am helping them with their English homework: quite often they cannot even do in Portuguese what they are being asked to do in English. Sometimes this is because what they are being asked to do is fairly conceptually difficult (who is the mother of my aunt?). But often it is because they simply don’t have a good enough grasp of their own language to be learning another. But therein lies the problem, it’s not their own language. It is a language that they learned upon entering school, from people who don’t speak it very well, that they speak only within the school grounds, and with no reading material available to augment their learning opportunities. On many occasions I have been helping someone spell something and I say the letter in Portuguese, and they write a different letter. These are 8th and 11th graders! And they still have trouble and mix up letters on a regular basis. Twice I was translating a phrase with someone and I asked what “na” in, for example, “na escola” meant. I told them that “na” was actually a contraction of two words: “em” (in) and “a” (the). They had no idea! They had been using this word for as long as they have been speaking Portuguese without understanding what it actually meant and apparently without the intellectually curiosity to wonder why “na” doesn’t actually exist as a word.
Yesterday I was teaching when a middle-aged white guy walked by my classroom and, I think just thrilled to see another white person, stopped and stuck his head in and asked “tudo bom?” (everything good/what’s up?). “Tudo bom” I responded. He smiled and left. I asked my class if they know who he was but they didn’t and were about as bewildered as I was.