Nome: Alexandra Accoroni Gonçalves
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não ifnormado


Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Alexandra. She lived with her parents , an older sister and a younger brother. She was nine years old and very, very insecure and shy. Her mother, who didn’t know anything about psychology, thought that if she compared Alexandra to her sister, Ana Marta, she would feel compeled to do the same things her sister did. She thought she was encouraging her to develop her skills. She didn’t know that the opposite was happening and Alexandra was getting more and more insecure.

Their mother decided to enroll them in an English course in order to give them all the good opportunities in life. Ana was a great student, very intelligent and studious. Alexandra wasn’t a good student at all. With the constant comparisons with her sister, Alexandra started to hate English. Her mother used to take her to the English school and wait for the end of the class just outside of the classroom because Alexandra would run away... It was terrible! In a whole semester, Ana learned a lot of new words and started to speak some sentences in English; Alexandra learned how to say “octopus” during the same semester... What a disaster!!!! 

Another semester at the English course. It was a very good school called Thomas Jefferson Institute, in Brasília. It was the best school there and they used to use communicative approach in their classes. Ana Marta was already known at school as a promise. She could make sentences , speak , listen to her teachers and colleagues. She was great!!! Poor Alexandra, what a failure.... Another semester was gone and she learned only “what time is it?”, but she didn’t know how to answer....

Her mother was tired of spending a lot of money with Alexandra and decided to take her off that awful English school. She sent her to an old lady who taught English at home to a small group of children. Lúcia was here name. What a gentle and kind lady... She didn’t ask Alexandra to speak English at all. She taught English through the grammar-structure method so students didn’t have to speak English until they knew the grammar well. Alexandra was a shy girl, she was embarassed to speak English in front of the others because she was afraid of making mistakes and of being compared to the others classmates and not because she was dumb. But something happened with her at that small classroom during the semester. Mrs. Lúcia didn’t forced her to speak and let her only repeat the sentences and texts. She gave Alexandra as many written exercises as she could . and all of a sudden, what a surprise!!! It was almost magical!!!! A miracle!!!!After her first semester with Mrs. Lúcia, she knew as many words as her sister! Her pronunciation was amazing! But she was still very shy to speak English in front of anyone.

Another semester with Mrs. Lúcia was gone and she could read and write in English as her sister. She could understand English better than Ana and her grades at regular school had improved. She was confident about herself now. Two years were gone with Mrs. Lúcia and Alexandra was now much better than Ana in English. She could read, write and understand English very well but, well, she blocked her speaking skills because of the comparisons.

The family decided to move to Belo Horizonte and Alexandra had to say goodbye to her sweet teacher who believed she was able to learn as much as her sister. In Belo Horizonte, Alexandra grew as a person because she realized she needed to make friends or she would be alone for the rest of her life there. She just swalloed her shyness and started talking to people at school and everywhere else. In a while, she had a lot of friends in that new city. One day, when she was 22 years old, she met a Russian basketball player through a common friend. She fell in love with him immediately. He couldn’t speak Portuguese and she couldn’t speak Russian. What to do then??! Ah! English was the solution!!! Then Alexandra digged from her past all those lessons Mrs. Lúcia taught her and decided to take a chance. She took a deep breath and opened her mouth and.... WOW! She knew how to speak English!!! The power of love made her overcome her problems ! She wasn’t very good at the beginning but with some practice and patience she improved her speaking skills gradually. She dated this player for 1 year and before he was gone back to Moscow, he said she should study languages instead of Chemistry because she was good at it.

Do you want to know the end of this story? Well, I quit Chemistry and decided to try Letras in 1995. I was admitted to UFMG and started my course. I had to quit Letras because of my family business (that’s another story) and in 1999 I took another vestibular test and I was again admitted to UFMG to take Letras course. If I like it? No, not at all! I just LOVE it! I learned a lot from life and from people I met in my life, but I learned the world with Mrs. Lúcia and Alexander Egorov ( the Russian basketball player). I own them the choise of my profession. I LOVE being a teacher. I’m not a good one but i hope to touch my students heart just like Mrs. Lúcia did and I hope I can help them making good choises in life just as Alexander did.

I teach at ETIMIG and at MAGNUM BURITIS. I was about to abandon Magnum because of the environment. But last week I had the most gratifying experience since I started teaching. Some time ago, I asked you to help me with a student who was about to be sent away from Magnum because of drugs. I advised her, she moved to another school and I took her to make a course to know herself. She called me and say “Fessorinha, você foi a melhor amiga que eu tive no Magnum. ‘Brigada por me ouvir e me ajudar. Te amo pra sempre!” . That was very touching. And last Saturday , another student, at ETIMIG, gave me a beautiful birthday present with a letter which says: 
“O que você pensa, você cria;
O que você sente, você atrai;
O que você acredita, torna-se realidade!”

Then she wrote:

“Alexandra,
Há pessoas que querem ser bonitas para chamar a atenção. Outras desejam a inteligência para serem admiradas. Mas, há algumas que procuram cultivar a alma e os sentimentos. Essas alcançam o carinho de todos, por que além de belas e inteligentes, tornam-se realmente pessoas! Feliz aniversário da sua aluna que te adora, V. A. S.”

Isn’t that beautiful? Fills our heart with that warm feeling of doing the right thing, being in the right place, making the difference in people’s lives. I decided to teach through communicative approach and grammar structure methods, depends on the level I’m teaching and I think it works better than one method only.