So how did third year play out for individual students? What are the strategies they adopted? I look at the ways in which Carla, Renan and Maynara approached third year and preparing for vestibular.
Carla
Carla’s approach to the luta was physically and emotionally demanding as she endured long hours sitting in classrooms, far from her parents who lived in the interior. Carla studied with the honours turma at Colégio Ceará in the mornings. When class finished around 1pm, she ate lunch at a self-service, went to the gym, showered and then headed to Colégio Farias Brito for vestibular cursinho from 6-10pm. She was up the next morning at 6:45 to be at Colégio Ceará for 7:20am. Sometimes, Carla would skip the gym to attend afternoon classes at Colégio Ceará; other times, she spent an afternoon working on an essay at the Writing Lab. Her cursinho offered extra classes and simulados at the weekend so she had to choose whether to attend these at Colégio Ceará or Colégio Farias Brito.
This gruelling schedule left Carla with little time for reviewing content. Carla admitted that she did not know when she would read the 9 required texts38 for the São Paulo vestibular that she planned to take after ENEM. She did
38 ENEM did not have a required reading list but some university vestibular
processes provided lists of Brazilian literary classics that students were expected to read.
almost no homework or studying outside of class; however, Carla explained that this was OK because she learned best from watching classes. The more classes she saw, the better. Carla’s tactic focused on quantity rather than quality. Both schools seemed to suggest that extra classes, tests, and resources would help so Carla had made herself flexible to these long hours and compliant to an unpredictable schedule. If attendance and long hours were any measure of the luta, Carla was committed and working hard. Still, she was not being rewarded. Midway through the year, she showed me the stack of apostilas and simulados she had acquired. Her simulado scores were not showing the progress she had hoped but surely all these resources were bound to pay off.
Carla recognised the sacrifices that she and her family were making: her parents worked hard to pay for her schooling and living costs in Fortaleza and she suffered being far away from them. Carla confided that she felt lonely living by herself but her busy schedule kept her occupied and stopped her from feeling too sad. Though, sometimes, living away from her parents and the pressures of third year made her feel so desanimada (down, dispirited) that she would stay home and watch television on her own or, better yet, she would skip her cursinho to spend the evening with Maynara’s family.
Renan
Renan had attended afternoon classes at Colégio Ceará since the beginning of high school. He paid an additional R$70 to attend extra maths and history classes at Colégio Ceará on Thursday evenings after his regular classes finished. Students in these extra classes seemed more committed to studying. Teachers worked vestibular-style problem sets with minimal interruptions. Renan struggled to pay attention in regular classes – how boring to watch the same lectures that he had already seen! Though classes could be dull, Renan liked that he could see his group of friends who lived scattered across the city. He frequently chatted to Eva and others around him during classes but kept his conversations quiet enough as not to annoy the teacher.
Renan worked the problem sets at the back of each section of the apostila and practiced his essay writing. In addition, he was trying to concentrate on building other skills for vestibular: his reading speed and stamina. Professor
Luziane had stressed the importance of reading in preparation for vestibular, “Every book that you read will increase your ability to interpret passages. You will improve your vocabulary and your logic skills. Read newspapers, magazines, and books. Read!” Yet, Veja, the most widely read weekly newsmagazine, cost R$10 and novels (even young adult fiction) ran between R$25 and R$50. At these prices, reading was an expensive habit39. Thankfully the Colégio Ceará library stocked magazines and newspapers alongside popular novels. Renan showed me the book he had checked out from the library to “train” his reading ability: Formaturas Infernais (Prom Nights from Hell), translated short stories by popular US teen authors. Likewise, Renan’s friend Eva was reading the Percy Jackson young adult series. These books, Eva pointed out, had an added benefit since the reader learned about ancient Greece. Reading appeared to be one of the easier tactics that the school and wider society advocated in preparing for vestibular.
Renan’s third-year tactic appeared to be simply getting through third year and vestibular preparation without causing too many problems in class or his life. He could not wait for third year to be over so that he would have his life back. His parents had taken the school’s advice to heart and left him at home while they spent the July holidays in São Paulo. Renan was disappointed and annoyed to have missed out on this trip. Truthfully, he had studied very little while they were gone anyway.
Maynara
Maynara had decided to have a blowout holiday with plenty of beach, shoppings, and fun before third year started so that she would be ready to focus and devote herself completely. Unfortunately, her friends had been out of town so she had spent the break at home by herself. She calculated that this disappointment and sadness had meant that she never quite studied as much as she had planned during third year. The worry that she was not doing enough manifested itself in stomach troubles: Maynara lost four kilos while preparing for vestibular.
39 Beleza (2012) argues that books in Brazil are material goods imbued with symbolic
Colégio Ceará awarded Maynara a full scholarship (though her family could pay) as she had always been one of the school’s brightest pupils and the school did not want to lose Maynara to another colégio. While Maynara judged her performance to be underwhelming, Colégio Ceará thought otherwise and paid for her and Jorge to take private Chemistry lessons to help boost their ENEM scores. Disregarding the school’s advice about extracurricular classes, Maynara continued taking bi-weekly English lessons. Furthermore, she evaluated and chose the extra Colégio Ceará classes that she would attend: Current Events class was helpful but Reading Comprehension was not worth the investment as she could spend that hour working practice questions or reviewing study materials in the library. Extra Sunday classes were fun since the lessons were veritable stand-up comedy. On the other hand, Saturday morning ENEM problem-solving sessions were dull so Maynara borrowed the question sets from a friend and worked them on her own. She also photocopied Carla’s cursinho apostilas to compare what Colégio Farias Brito and Colégio Ceará were teaching. Maynara did not always pay attention during class: sometimes she text messaged her boyfriend or read a textbook that she had checked out from Colégio Ceará’s library.
Maynara had taken ENEM and the UECE vestibular the previous year and her performance had merited spaces in biology at both UFC and UECE. She used these and other experiences to make assessments of the materials she needed to study and worked accordingly.
Conclusions
First and foremost, Colégio Ceará students were meant to dedicate themselves to hard work in the present in order to reap rewards in the future. (See Chapter 5 for more about how dreams helped students to accomplish this.) Bombarded with classes, study options, and materials, students like Carla, Renan and Maynara had to filter this information in order to decide on an individual approach to third year and their studying practices during this literal and figurative test. School was no longer a cooperative endeavour, where classmates (against the rules) helped one another on tests; during third year, school was about preparing the individual. Some students’ intentions to
study never quite came to fruition. Others succumbed to preguiça – though this does not necessarily mean that they did not pass.
What dispositions did the luta cultivate? “Successful” students approached the luta with flexibility, commitment, and determination to get through hundreds of hours of classes, extra classes, and practice tests – or, as the frustrated Physics teacher put it, they “paid attention to this boring stuff”. These dispositions are similar to those that characterise the batalhadores: “this worker is capable of great personal, physical and psychological sacrifices; adaptable to the arbitrary impositions of businesses that demand… flexibility” (Visser 2010: 70). Students like Renan learned to avoid drawing teachers’ attention. Staying quiet – though often sleeping, reading or doing work for other classes – meant there would be no problems with the authority in the classroom. This behaviour did not imply respect for the authority; students were simply compliant. As the intensity of the luta waxed and waned throughout the year, many students crafted their first stories of hard work and dedication – different to those of their batalhador parents. In the next chapter, I show how teachers and students cultivated and employed "self- esteem" to get through the luta.
Chapter 4 “We are supposed to be confident”: Self-
esteem for the Luta
Five weeks before third-year students were set to take ENEM, Biology teacher Ismael enthusiastically asked the honours turma, “Who is ready?” To Ismael’s chagrin, only four of the class’s fifty students raised their hands. The remaining students, many of them exhausted after months of six- and seven- day weeks filled with extra classes and practice exams, shifted uncomfortably or stared at the ground. Professor Ismael scolded, “Then you must not be studying enough.” News that the school’s top cohort had “given up” travelled quickly. By the end of the week, class co-presidents Jorge and Larícia had asked for five minutes of English class so that they could address the problem of plummeting motivation. As usual, Larícia spoke for the pair, “This isn’t a regular class that is not motivated. This is the honours class. I know that you are tired but we have to keep studying. We cannot let the honours name down!”
After Larícia finished, English teacher Pedro wrote “maratona” (marathon) on the board, telling students,
I recognize this phenomenon. With one month left to go before the exam, people do this. You must remember that all the years of studying will be reflected now. You’re tired. I don’t accept that! Now it’s the final sprint to the finish line in the marathon that has been this year of vestibular preparation. No one said this was easy. You’re competing against many people. It’s not the time for you to stop. Your parents have made the investment. They have paid your private school fees for your entire life and they don’t get the prize? Your parents will have to pay for faculdade particular (private university) too?
Forty minutes into this lecture, I noticed Pedro consult his watch. He appeared to be calculating the time he would need to fill so as to avoid giving the week’s English lesson. Many students had stopped paying attention: Jorge scanned the Sports section of the newspaper, Mariela read from her Atualidades (current events) study guide, and Ana slept facedown in her notebook. Pedro continued, “You have two choices: you continue with the
necessary força (force, strength) or not? What was my motivation? One day I would tell the story of my success in my own classroom – and here I am! If you want to motivate yourself, think about what you want in your future.” Mercifully, the bell rang, announcing a half-hour break before the final three classes of the day. As my bleary-eyed classmates and I gathered to chat, the ever-astute Maynara commented, “I bet that was good for your research.” I smirked, confirming Maynara’s suspicions and registered my lingering confusion, “Of course, you are anxious and you are not going to say that you feel prepared. There’s always more that you could study.” Maynara laughed at my inability to comprehend and explained carefully, “Michele, even if we think that we are not ready, that’s not what we are supposed to say. We are supposed to be confident. They want us to be confident.”
Maynara’s assessment allowed me to make sense of the motivational asides (planned and impromptu sermon-like lectures, YouTube videos, Facebook messages and films) with which students had been bombarded throughout the year. Teachers and students wove motivational work into their daily interactions as a sort of prerequisite for ENEM (and beyond). So much time was devoted to developing self-esteem that, at times, academic coursework suffered. This crisis of confidence that the honours class experienced, wherein students failed to exude the self-esteem that private schooling was meant to instil, illustrated the co-curricular imperative of developing self-esteem. In this chapter, I explore the concept of self-esteem and analyse the role that the development of self-esteem played in the classroom at Colégio Ceará.