Brynn Barineau

Tag: Education

  • To American School or Not To American School in Rio de Janeiro

    To American School or Not To American School in Rio de Janeiro

    What would expect to get for $40,000? A great car? A renovated kitchen? What about $40,000 every year for four years, $160,000? A Harvard diploma? Nope, try a high school diploma.

    The American School in Rio de Janeiro, at the high school level, costs $33,000 a year. New students pay a registration fee of $6,500, making the grand total for freshman year $39,181. This does not include bus fees or lunch. Now, if you only have a toddler, it’s much more reasonable. Just $19,600 for half day pre-school.

    A few months back I got a message asking about schools for American kids in Rio de Janeiro. Full disclaimer: I have no kids of my own. What I know about EARJ, the American school in Rio, comes from working with high schoolers applying to college in the US. And that was only for two years. My sample size is admittedly small. Weight my opinion what you will.

    I’ve never written about EARJ because I was working with kids attending the school (i.e. their parents were paying clients). They were all great kids and I thought the professional thing to do was to remain neutral on the subject.

    Now that I’m based in Vitoria, here’s my opinion. For $40,000 a year, I expect my child to be able to build a time machine to travel back to ancient Rome and discuss in fluent Latin with Julius Caesar his reasons for taking the army across the Rubicon.

    It’s not that the school is bad. On contrary, I’ve met some really bright and driven kids who go there. I’ve also been stared at by a room of blank faces when asking for the formula for the area of a circle. My problem with the American school is that you pay $40,000 for the equivalent of a solid public school education.

    In my classes, students from the British school and Brazilian private schools like Sao Agostinho ($9,900 per year), consistently out scored the EARJ kids in math. Let’s not talk about the EARJ kids’ abysmal writing scores. I now think the best way to learn English grammar might be by taking it at a Brazilian high school.

    Essays, vocabulary and reading comprehension are EARJs strong points. This makes perfect sense given American educational culture. American teens (or Brazilians who attend an American school) don’t know what to do with a semicolon but they can express their personal opinions quite fluently. We also tend to focus more on the type of critical thinking tested in reading comprehension.

    To be clear, when I say the EARJ kids score better, that doesn’t mean they’re making 800s on the practice tests. No, the scores I saw were typically average, if not a little below. And here’s the amazing thing, they seem totally unaware of the fact that they are average.

    I said earlier that the kids I’ve taught were great. I genuinely liked everyone of them. There’s just a sense of entitlement common to the EARJ culture. Pausing to look up from their iPhones and Blackberrys, kids with average SAT scores will tell you how NYU is their backup school. Or maybe Duke. Duke might be ok if Cornell turns them down.

    NYU as a backup? Maybe if you’re the next Stephen Hawking. Where are the guidance counselors?! How can these kids be in their junior year of high school with no clue as to what a competitive SAT score is? For $40,000 a year, I’d want someone my kid can dictate her essay to.

    And we’re back to what you get for your money. I would assume that one of the benefits of sending your kids to the American high school as opposed to the British or Brazilian schools, is that you have a leg up when it comes to college admissions in the US. Someone would be there to guide you through an admissions process that is complex, bureaucratic and unique. It doesn’t seem to be the case at EARJ. The kids don’t seem more knowledgeable than any other students.

    So it’s left to the SAT teachers to talk to the kids, point out the average scores, and crush their dreams. Thanks a lot, EARJ!

    My husband and I will most likely go the Brazilian school route with our kids. They will get their English lit exposure from Mommy’s Summer Reading List. Expats moving to Rio with older kids probably can’t put them into a competitive, Brazilian school like Agostinho or Bento. In that case, I’m forced to be a traitor and recommend the British school. Their students have a more solid foundation in math and English and the school’s a little cheaper.

    Of course, if Chevron is footing your tuition bill, hell, go crazy. Enroll your kids, your maid’s kids, and your dog too. The campus is gorgeous and I think each student is given her own pet monkey.

  • My Peculiar Professional Niche: Helping Brazilian Students Study Abroad

    My Peculiar Professional Niche: Helping Brazilian Students Study Abroad

    Last Friday, Veja.com, posted an article on the growing number of Brazilian students attending college abroad. I found the article from a link posted by one of my former students, who just happens to be featured in the article. Flavia, is one of the 24,000 Brazilians, who attended college abroad in 2009. She’s studying economics at Harvard. I like to think I played a very small part in getting her there.

    My peculiar niche in the great market of Rio de Janeiro was teaching Brazilians how to write the personal statement for college applications. I also taught Kaplan SAT prep classes through FK Partners, but it was the essay workshop that I loved most.

    The Fulbright/Education USA office in Rio was kind enough (desperate enough) to let me develop a workshop despite the fact I had very little experience teaching kids. I also had real doubt as to whether or not I could spend time with a room of full of teenagers and not resort to physical violence at some point. I did not like high schoolers when I was one, I was pretty sure they hadn’t improved in 8 years.

    Well, 8 years changed something because I LOVE working with teenagers. At this age they’re just starting to figure out who they are as individual people, with their own opinions and dreams. Even at their most self-absorbed moments, I find them fresh and amusing. (Of course, I’m teaching kids who are trying to attend college. The true hooligans don’t sign up for my class.)

    Flavia was in my very first workshop. I told the kids they were my guinea pigs (a metaphor I then had to explain) and they were great. Respectful of me and supportive of each other. That support turned out to be a critical element.

    It turns out a workshop on personal statements really does get personal. In two weeks, I knew what achievement my students were most proud of, what they were afraid of and their most important memories. Forget therapy. If you want to know the inner most thoughts of a group of teenagers, have them write a personal statement.

    I also love the cultural elements that come into play. You might not know, but probably are not surprised to learn, that writing about yourself in first person is a very American thing. While my students definitely struggle with prepositions, they are completely thrown by the first person. I have been told time and again that Brazilian students never write in first person.

    And this whole, “what event in your past has most shaped who you are today” self-reflective stuff. “American universities really want to know about what I learned from my mom?” “Why does my opinion matter? I’m not anyone important.”

    Can you imagine an American teenager asking why people would care about his opinion?! It’s pretty much assumed by all American teens that their opinion is in fact the only one that matters. And that’s what I love about the workshop. I get to see how a different culture interprets something so ubiquitous to my American perception. The College Application Essay.

    Unfortunately, I won’t be giving any essay workshops this fall. Our move to Vitoria has made that impossible. But I am pursuing some options that I hope will allow me to keep working with teenagers and hopefully, send a couple more Brazilians Flavia’s way.

  • Reading or Things I Take For Granted

    Reading or Things I Take For Granted

    When was the last time you appreciated the ability to read?  For me, never. I’ve never finished a book and marveled at the feat I just accomplished.  I really should because reading is amazing!

    I can look at these squiggles and recognize that they have meaning.  They stand for a sound.  I can then put the little sounds together to form words, which are entities with their own meaning.  I can take the meaning of the individual words, scan them in order, and understand a complete thought or sentence.  Each thought has it’s own meaning but when read together as a series, like in a paragraph, they combine to describe even more complex ideas like why the Roman Empire collapsed.

    While reading this post your brain is doing some awesome computing and for you, it probably seems effortless.  This is not the case for everyone. I’m not even talking about people with physical differences in their brain that impede reading.  I’m referring to people who, for whatever reason, missed out on being taught how to read.

    Our brains, thanks to thousands of years of evolution, are programmed for language learning.  Drop a three year old anywhere in the world and she’ll learn to speak the language without any intervention.  If your brain were a computer, it comes with the language learning software pre-installed.  This is not the case for reading.  Reading cannot simply be acquired.

    Written language was developed much more recently in human history and our brains do not yet come with this software.  It has to be manually installed one lesson at a time.  Basically, I’ve come to understand that learning to read requires a teacher.  If someone doesn’t have the teacher or the time to practice, she will never read.

    Why am I thinking about literacy? Yesterday, our maid stopped in front of a map we had out for framing.  She asked my husband, “Is this a map of the United States?”  My husband, without missing a beat, said off handedly, “Oh no, that’s a map of the world.  Here’s Brazil and here’s Africa.  Up here is the United States.”  I froze at the question and the realization that here was an adult who didn’t know what the world looked like. It blew my mind. My husband pointed out later that not recognizing the map means very little, if any schooling, so she probably is functionally illiterate.

    I think her question threw me because I had not put her in my “unfortunate circumstance” category.  Our maid is responsible,  hard working, a great cook and keeps her word.  If we agree on next Tuesday morning, she shows up next Tuesday on time without a single reminder.  She is proactive and will clean or fix things that need it but that I haven’t necessarily mentioned.  She has raised a family. I’ve worked with people not half as competent. But she doesn’t know what a map of the world looks like.  And probably doesn’t read.

    I’ve been thinking about that ten second exchange since yesterday. The best response I have so far is to be thankful.  I am going to be grateful for my good, free schools.  I’m going to appreciate that my parents could afford to let me be a full time student.  A good education is not, unfortunately, a guarantee in life.  I’m going to be grateful for mine and what an awesome reader I became as a result.