It’s difficult to imagine the kind of person it takes to dedicate their entire lives to caring for children. To spend their years first caring for their own child, and then to get a job that aims to do the same thing, but with hundreds of them at once. Patricia Menezes says she was born to be a teacher, and she was for 25 years of her life. She is hundreds of other things beyond that; she is the mother of Sarah Cardoso, beloved chemistry teacher and owner of the greatest after-lunch gossip hotspot. She is the director of our Preschool, helping to create a foundation for the future students that will occupy our halls. From this premise, the entire school feels her influence. She has established us as people from the moment we joined this community, and has made it a wonderful place to inhabit throughout her long standing career.
She had initially taught at Graded, in São Paulo, before she got pregnant with Ms. Sarah and decided to enroll her into EAC. She admitted that even though her family lived here, and it was the primary reason for her move, she was slightly swayed by the weather. Nobody can stand the gloomy skies of São Paulo.
“Quando olho uma criança, ela me inspira pelo que ela é, e eu respeito o potencial do que ela poderá se tornar. Ela é ativa e sincera, criativa, espontânea.”
“When I look at a child, they inspire me for who they are, and I respect what they may become. They are active and sincere, creative, and spontaneous.”
She is someone genuinely inspired by the children she works with; she finds them spontaneous and different from the worn-down nature of adults. “Quando olho uma criança, ela me inspira pelo que ela é, e o respeito pela o que ela possa ser. Ela é ativa e sincera, criativa, espontânea.” She feels the children at EAC are more balanced than at other schools, and this is the environment she works towards; An environment where students are understood and are allowed to flourish, and individual attention is given to them.
As well as working with children, she has worked closely with four different headmasters in her time as preschool director — David Cardenas, Steve Herrera, Tom Pado, Michael Arcidiacono—, alleging that each had a very different style of leading the school. “All excellent. Each one with their own personality, but all very good.” I’m sure we remember Steve Herrera, who worked here for 17 years and who cooked turkey for us during Thanksgiving. Throughout all of these years, the school grew, and the many changes we went through were particularly noticeable for the teachers who’d been here for a long time.
“The school has grown a lot, and it has become more challenging to have a lot of closeness. Among the different departments, there are very positive interactions, especially involving the children.” she said about the relationships the teachers have within the school. Many teachers have enrolled their own children into the student body, and this helps build a meaningful bond between teachers.
She feels that a meaningful relationship between students and teachers is something that the school should never change, and even though the school has grown so much, that individual focus hasn’t completely changed since EAC’s founding. What she does miss is the focus on hiring international teachers, who haven’t been hired often in recent years. It is important to have people speaking English normally with the children from their enrollment in the school, as to assimilate them to the language. With Brazilian teachers, this becomes harder, even though more native teachers would never be necessarily a bad thing.
What makes EAC so distinct from other schools, which I would personally agree on, is the nature and greenery on our campus. The school is filled with trees, nature, flowers, which students are all pretty much free to explore, and this connection we’ve created to nature is extremely important to the aura we have within the school. With this freedom, also comes the liberty to express their ideas, creativity, and emotion, which has always been a marker for the culture at EAC. The arts have always been a strong point, and I am always in full admiration with the exhibitions we’ve had here. Patricia’s first request in our school is definitely a new theater, which is coming soon with the demolition of the old gym! She hopes never to lose the personal connection we harbor with each other, and notes that Paulinha has always remembered the names of everyone, their mothers, fathers and siblings. That connection is important in our learning journey, and it is definitely a marker of our community.
Patricia is someone with the purest of intentions; she holds a deep, intrinsic hope for the future, and hopes to nurture the children at this school with the same hope, and to raise them to truly reflect EAC’s core values. I feel a tremendous sense of pride coming from her, from her work and the children she has truly helped raise.
A sincere thank you, from our entire community, to the person who has created a wonderful foundation for all of us.
Also, I took the liberty of asking her for a few facts about Ms. Sarah, which I thought would be fun to share because we’d likely never get better information about her than from her own mother. She has always been a bit of a nerd; she’s loved reading since she was a kid, and loves learning as much as she loves teaching. Though she’s excited to be a grandma, Patricia also is worried about Ms. Sarah being too controlling, since she has always been such a good, well-behaved child. “Sempre gostou de ler livros, e gostava muito de participar de todas as atividades. Ela sempre foi uma criança muito feliz.” She feels a lot of pride, and I credit her for raising such a good chemistry teacher!
EAC PRESS 