Thoughts on my classes here at my university in São Paulo:
- No electives, only your designated course path! I'm taking classes from three separate departments, which is shocking to some here.
- The student-professor relationship is much more casual than anything I've experienced before. In one of my classes, we talked about the idea of considering a professor as part of your extended family or of using familial idioms in your conception of a professor, and whether or not it was problematic to call a professor "tia," for example. All of this went under the assumption that if not "tia," your professor was called by their first name. The idea of calling your professor by their last name was, as discussed in the class, shocking and counterproductive to the pursuit of collective learning.
- Some of the Brazilian students straight up read magazines or talk on the phone in one of my classes. In the other two, if you don't do the readings beforehand, you will be singled out and probably mocked. (Kidding. Just shunned.)
- Brasil speaks (very) frankly about its colonial history and about the fact that it was a colonizing power/a colonized country, and that the ruling class or powerful group remains rooted in this "colonizador," as it's called here. I can honestly not imagine any university course in the States speaking so frankly about the United States as a colonized space; obviously, the colonial history is different here than in the U.S., especially in the fact that the US was colonized by families seeking a new home and Brasil by single men seeking to exploit resources, but both were--and remain--countries that were built from colonized areas.
- Brazilian students have a nice system set up in which a few people are assigned the reading each week and they are the ones who present or participate in discussions, leaving me and the rest of the class to nod along in implicit agreement.
- People do not, in general, like the U.S.'s economic or political strategies, except for the odd neoliberal thrown in there, but they very genuinely view the U.S. as the pinnacle of social and economic development and liberty. For example, during Ferguson--which was widely publicized here, as well as globally, for a few days--two of my three professor and my host mom said to me, "I saw a black person died in the United States. Black people die here all the time." That is, verbatim, what my anthropology professor said. I was unsure of how to respond, or of how to address that depth of a misconception. Issues like racism can be compared between here and there, because certainly racism exists in both places, but, equally certainly, it takes a different form; racism in these two locations cannot, however, be stacked against each other or measured on a scale. It just won't work.
- A smoke break is taken quite literally. The professor and the students go into the hallway to smoke a cigarette, then go downstairs for a coffee, then back up to smoke another one. I repeat, in the hallway.
Overall, my university here is an incredibly liberal and progressive space, and I am learning so much about how Brazilians view themselves, the global sphere and community, and the United States. I am also learning exactly how much time it takes my sociology professor to smoke two cigarettes. I'm hoping that what I take back with me from these classes (including this aforementioned tidbit) is relevant to what I continue to study, but even if not? Everything I'm learning here is awesome.