I’ve spent the last couple of days editing essays.  I’m drowning in essays.  During a break, I watched a clip of the Daily Show where they showed a commentator ranting about how teachers are paid too much for a part-time job.  I envisioned ramming a two-inch stack of ungraded essays down his throat until he chocked.  It made me happy and reminded me that I still had about 20 essays left to grade.

When not being used as a weapon, my student’s essays are also an endless source of amusement.  I fill entire dinner conversations relating what pearls of wisdom my kids have come up with.  The essays are also helping me compile a list of potential extra curricular activities available in Vitoria for any future Brazilian-Americans I have in my house.

It’s fascinating to see what activities teenagers in the US and Brazil share and what activities are unique not just to Brazil but to Vitoria.

It’s no surprise a kid in Vitoria can be a soccer player but I also have competitive basketball players, skateboarders and surfers as well.  Judo is pretty popular.  There are ballet studios and acting lessons. With my guitar players, drummers, pianists and singers, I can supply any event in Vitoria with a band.  One of my students has taken cooking lessons and runs a small business catering desserts for parties.  Another is a financier in the making, having taken classes on the stock market and started his own investment portfolio.

But I think my favorite hobby, of all the hobbies I’ve read about, is competitive oceanic fishing.  It’s not my favorite because it’s anything I’d like to be proficient at myself but because it is such an utterly foreign activity to the suburban, Atlanta culture where I grew up.  Competitive oceanic fishing!  Maybe there were some kids in my school who regularly caught trout from the Chattahoochee River but nobody was heading to Australia to compete catching marlins.  Which is exactly what one of my students did.

I mentioned this to my husband and he said “Oh sure, Vitoria is one of the best spots for oceanic fishing along Brazil’s coast.”  Huh, a new fact about Vitoria thanks to my students’ essays.  It seems one of the perks of being a teachers is that the learning goes both ways.

Oceanic fishing is a skill I would never have thought to offer any of my future kids.  It wasn’t part of my childhood and I would not have made it part of theirs.  Now I know.  And if the kid doesn’t like fishing, there’s always surfing, sailing, samba dancing, cooking, judo and of course, soccer.