Today’s the last day of Portuguese school for the year. Check out my class’s first foray in Portuguese poetry, “A Cozinha da Avô.” In honor of Fernando Pessoa’s birthday, today I’m sharing our class’s journey to understanding “Mar Português.”

SAILING INTO THE END OF THE YEAR

While the kids in the preschool class are singing Portuguese songs for the end of year presentation we’re putting on to show the parents that their children really did learn something this year, I decided to give my students something I didn’t get much of in Portuguese school: poetry.

And since this is me we’re talking about, we had to study Fernando Pessoa. I wrote about why Mar Português has had such an impact on my life, so go check that out and the translation I wrote if you haven’t already because I’m diving right in.

I may have oversold the poem a bit when my students asked what we were doing that day. “We’re reading my favorite poem in Portuguese. My favorite poem in any language.” So that got their attention.

It also got their expectations up, which meant that the first stanza was a bit of a struggle to get through. All those salty tears and unmarried maidens are depressing without context. “Why is this your favorite?” “Wow, this is really sad.”

LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

It made me remember a particularly frustrating class I had in college. We were reading The Sound and the Fury, which I came to despise. (It’s an incomprehensible book about terrible people living terrible lives. Southern Gothic does nothing for me. Come at me.) Now, I didn’t expect to like every book that I was assigned, but the whole class was struggling to care. The professor, in a moment of frustration, said, “I want you to love this book because I do.”

Nope. That is not and will never be a good reason for me to love something. Or for me to teach it, frankly. I also love Jose Regio’s “Cantico Negro” but there’s no way I’m teaching a poem that talks about being born of the love between God and the Devil to a class of kids between the ages of seven and twelve.

No, I taught my kids “Mar Português” because I love it for its message. (For its Mensagem. Heh.) I couldn’t just give them a literal translation to build their vocabulary and call it a day. They needed to get the message or they were going to leave class that night thinking that Professora Elizabeth had depressing taste in poetry.

So after the first stanza, after the prayers in vain and weeping mothers, I paused. “Okay, we’re pretty low right now, right?” I asked. “Now see how high we’re about to go.”

Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena // Was it worth it? Everything is worth it

Se a alma não é pequena. // If the soul is not small.

Teaching may not be my full-time profession, but it will always be my vocation for moments like this one. I saw the looks on my students’ faces as they understood that this was the turn of the poem.

BEYOND GEOGRAPHY

They knew about the Portuguese discoveries because that’s pretty much the only thing you learn about Portugal in American schools. But they never learned about the costs until they encountered “Mar Português.” They never understood why passing Cape Bojador was hard. It’s just a spot on a map, right?

No. Once you get to Cape Bojador, the winds and currents turn against you. To keep sailing, you can’t follow the coast anymore. I never had to articulate that quirk of geography until my students asked about it. As I explained it to them, I understood something about this poem that I hadn’t before.

If your soul is not small, if you want to achieve greatness, if you want your sacrifices to be worth it, you have to turn away from the familiar and head straight into the unknown. Only then can you make your way to the Cape of Good Hope and beyond.

NEVER STOP LEARNING

I was happy and proud that my students were eventually able to understand why I love this poem so much. When it came time to split up who would be reading “Mar Português” and who would be reading “A Cozinha da Avô” on the last day of class, I had no shortage of volunteers who wanted to read about the price of the Portuguese sea. It warmed my Pessoa fangirl heart.

But beyond my happiness and pride, I am lucky. My students gave me the opportunity to understand this poem better than I ever would have if I hadn’t been their teacher this year. As I’ve transitioned from student to teacher, I love that I’m still learning.

Earlier this week, Major League Quidditch published an article I wrote when I was trying to convince people to join the Argonauts staff this summer. I’m not going to repeat anything I wrote there. I just want to expand on it because not everyone wants or can apply for an MLQ position.

If you’re reading this, you probably have some quidditch volunteer experience. You’ve probably wondered if it’s worth all the time, effort, and risk to your sanity. Will quidditch actually help you get a real job?

Yes. Maybe. Depends. But it’s not impossible.

FIRST, SOME BACKSTORY

This time last year, I quit a writing “internship” with a startup and kicked off my summer of funemployment. (read: I was overworked, underpaid, and worst of all, not doing much writing. ah, #startuplife) I graduated without notice during the previous winter and then dropped out of the teaching credential program that spring.

I went from being someone with a plan to being completely adrift. It was terrifying.

Not that you would know about my post-graduation crisis by looking at my resume; I was still USQ’s West Regional Coordinator then and I used that role to keep me from having an embarrassing hole in my work history. (The startup is nowhere to be seen; I only lasted a little over two weeks.) One year later, I have a real job that interests me, is relevant to what I studied in college, and pays well enough to afford a comfortable lifestyle in Silicon Valley.

Quidditch came up in my interview, it takes up some space in my resume, but that’s not the first thing my current employer cared about. It wasn’t the last, though. Quidditch didn’t get me a real life grown up job; it just helped.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

This is something every writer has drilled into them. Even if you’re not going into a writing intensive field, if you’re sending out resumes and cover letters, you’re a writer for the time being. Welcome to the club.

Some volunteer roles are just unpaid versions of real jobs. Looking to go into event management? You should definitely play up your tournament director experience. Trying to get a job in communications, social media, or public relations? I hope you spent time trying to make your team’s Twitter as good as Maryland, Rochester United, or the Gambits. Team officers are middle management in the making. Etc, etc.

Unfortunately, not every career path is quidditch related. Sometimes you may need to settle for making your volunteer experience a bullet point under “leadership experience” or “college organizations” and call it a day.

MAKE YOUR COVER LETTER RELEVANT

Okay, so you think quidditch can help you begin the journey down your career path of choice. Great. But you can’t just say, “I played quidditch! Hire me for my ~whimsy~ kthxbai!” in a cover letter. You have to make your quidditch experience relevant to the job you’re applying for.

In fact, you should make your cover letter relevant to the job you’re applying for, period. if you’re sending out stock cover letters for every job, they will know.

Here’s the cover letter I used when I applied for the editorial internship I landed last fall. A real internship this time — one where I had bylines and learned skills that I now use as a professional writer.

Dear realtor.com,

I’m applying for this editorial internship because I have been looking to put my writing skills and editorial experience to use. I’ve spent the past three years promoting something that sounds more like fantasy than reality: SJSU Quidditch. Explaining, let alone recruiting for, a full contact sport on broomsticks to both San Jose State’s jocks and nerds was a unique challenge. It sharpened my ability to make the impossible sound possible to anyone regardless of background.

I hope quidditch got your attention. While I love playing my sport, working for US Quidditch has also given me the opportunity to work with players from over thirty teams across five states as well as the league’s upper management. However, I wouldn’t have done any of that had I not co-founded and been the editor-in-chief of West Valley Voices, my community college’s literary magazine. There’s very little difference between a team of athletes and a team of editors. My time as Reed Magazine’s Lead Poetry Editor allowed me to put my obsessive need to organize and schedule to good use: I’ve never faced a deadline I couldn’t meet. However, it’s important to be flexible too, as my Portuguese students have taught me.

This editorial position calls for someone who can do more than just write. This position needs a someone who knows how to reach out to others, choose the right facts to emphasize based on their audience, and pitch in and be a team player while meeting their deadlines. I know I’m that person; I hope you give me the opportunity to prove it.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Elizabeth Barcelos

Because I was applying for a writing job, I bent my quidditch experience to fit the job. Other than one blog post, I hadn’t written much about housing. What I did know was how to change my pitch to fit an audience.

But as the letter goes on, I talked about quidditch less and less while bringing up my relevant experience more and more. I didn’t just yell at people running around on brooms while I was in college; I worked on two magazines. I wrote, I met deadlines, I worked with other writers. That experience was far more relevant to the position I was applying for.

By the end of the letter, there’s no mention of quidditch at all. It did the work of being an attention grabber. I might have been “that quidditch girl” to whoever read this, but I was that quidditch girl who already knew a thing or two about editorial and how to pitch a story. That’s why I got that internship.

VOLUNTEERING IS A JOB

I didn’t spend my summer of funemployment slacking off at my parents’ house, navel-gazing and waiting for a job to show up. Though I wasn’t getting paid, I was still working. Not only was I job hunting, I was thinking about ways to make the conference I started better and getting ready for West Fantasy that summer.

You know, the event I caught hell for moving to NorCal because I couldn’t find a reasonably priced LA venue. The tournament I blew my stack over when I found out it was going to conflict with an MLQ series while I was at the Shark Tank watching the Penguins wreck my Sharks in the Stanley Cup Finals. That West Fantasy. That was work.

That’s why that role lives in my work experience part of my resume.

US Quidditch — West Regional Coordinator
September 2015 — October 2016

I coordinated and communicated with schools, teams, players, and leaders from over thirty teams in the states of Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah. I provided information about league deadlines, news updates, and rule changes. I represented the region’s needs to the league. I supported the sport in regions of heavy team concentration (the SF Bay Area, the Greater LA Area, AZ, Salt Lake City) as well as nurture team growth in areas where teams are only just emerging (Hawaii, far Northern California, the Central Valley). I ran the @WestQuidditch Twitter account and moderated the USQ West Region Facebook group.

Honestly, this is a little padded. I’ll probably go back and cut this down for concision sometime soon. But when I wrote this, this was my job. Like it or not, it’s far easier to get a new job when you already have one. Since this role sat at the top of my resume for a while, I needed it to sound serious so that I would be taken seriously.

CONNECTIONS MATTER

Say you do get a call back from a potential employer. That’s great! They’re asking for professional references. Do you have any? Well, speaking as a former Regional Coordinator, I treated my role like a job. If you were ever a team captain, tournament director, referee, or any other volunteer that worked with me and got your shit done without needing me to use a Shame Nun meme on you: I am happy to talk about what a good little worker bee you are to any future employer.

I used my immediate supervisor at USQ (hi Eric!) as a reference and he got to tell HR all about how organized, communicative, and professional I am. Those are things I also say about myself in an interview, but it carries more weight when the people you’ve worked with say it to the people you want to work with.

Maybe you’re trying to get a job at a company where another quidditch person works. Employee referrals are a big point in your favor, so maybe don’t be a dick on the pitch and ruin your chances of networking later in life? Just saying.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s graduation season and a lot of you are out looking for your first big kid jobs. I wish I could say that it’ll be easy. I wish I could say that people care about quidditch as much as we do. But that’s just not true.

I spent a lot of time in college doing quidditch things, but that’s not all I was up to. Quidditch is just one part — granted, a pretty big part — of the whole package of Elizabeth Barcelos, Young Professional Person.

As my career continues, I’ll need to depend on quidditch less and less. And that’s okay. It got my foot in the door for the editorial internship I needed to start my career in my field of choice. Sometimes that foot is all you need.

A Carnation Crash Course

Forty-three years and one day ago, something unbelievable happened. A military coup overthrew a dictatorship in a bloodless coup to establish a democracy. Normally it’s the other way around, right? Bloody military coup brings about dictatorship. That’s the headline you’re used to seeing.

Well, that’s what happened in Portugal. Really. After forty-one years of the Estado Novo, a dictatorship headed for most of its existence by the most low-key of European dictators, Antonio Salazar (and if that name is familiar, it’s because JK Rowling named the founder of Slytherin House after him), a positive regime change happened from within during the Cold War without US intervention. Pretty cool, huh?

The army took to the streets of Lisbon and took over. The people welcomed them and gave them carnations to put in their rifles and on their uniforms, and that’s how the Carnation Revolution got its name.

Things got a little more complicated later, but my students are between seven and twelve years old. I can only go into so much political nuance. At least one of them didn’t know what the words dictator or democracy meant before class yesterday.

After the meltdown my students had over our most recent presidential election, I was a little worried about talking about politics in class again. It’s also pointless exercise to make 1-to-1 comparisons between a 40+ year dictatorship and the first 100 days of a demogogue-in-chief. I’m not saying I’m a fan of dictatorships (except when the dictator is me, of course), but at least Salazar was an economics professor before we went into politics.

Professora Elizabeth: Dictator

(students names have been changed, but these things really happened)

Normally, my classroom door is open before class. I talk to the kids about their week if they come in early. I give them sneak peek of what we’re doing that day. I want to be approachable. I want them to feel like Portuguese school is fun.

Yesterday, the door was firmly shut until 6:30 on the dot. A few of them knocked. I told them to wait until it was time for class. As they entered, I took away all their books and their electronic devices. Instead of letting them sit at the big table together like they usually do, I split them up by gender, then I had them sit in groups no bigger than three.

“You guys have been messing around too much,” I said. “So you’re going to sit there, copy the new verb on the board, and not talk. I will know if you talk because one of you is a spy. They will tell me the truth.”

Stunned silence.

“Except for Amalia and Noelia,” I said, singling out two of my students. “You two, come with me into the office. Now.”

My classroom was the quietest it’s ever been as I led the girls into the back office.

Once the door was shut, I took the Professora Ditadora mask off. “Don’t worry guys, you aren’t in trouble. We’re doing a history lesson today. Do you guys know what a dictatorship is?” I handed them the red carnations, gave them a quick breakdown of what I was doing, and told them when they could come into class and hand out the flowers.

I went back into the silent classroom, asked if they were done (they weren’t), and then went back into the office and shut the door loud enough for them to hear. Then I quietly cracked it open again. It didn;t take too long to hear the whispers.

The Professora Ditadora mask was back on as I stormed into the classroom. “Who was talking? Don’t think I don’t know.”

“No one was talking,” Alvaro said.

“I know you’re lying. Either the spy is going to tell me after class and you’re all going to write lines, or one of you will tell me right now.”

Valeria raised a guilty finger at Aurelia, who nodded guiltily. I made everyone get back to work and led her into the office.

Oh God, please don’t cry, I thought as I was trailed by heartbroken seven-year-old. I crouched down to her level once the door was shut. “Aurelia, querida, you’re not in trouble. Everything is okay. Do you know a dictatorship is?”

“No.”

“What about a democracy?”

“No.”

“That’s okay. Go sit with Amalia and Noelia. When it’s time, you’re going to help them, okay? No one is in trouble.”

“Okay.”

I headed back into the classroom and had my students come show me their work. Normally, I roam the classroom and walk them through anything they might have trouble with. Yesterday, however, I sent them back to their seats and made them fix things themselves if there were mistakes.

The class was still quieter than it had ever been. They were miserable and confused and I was dying for it to be 6:45.

The Method Behind the Madness

Once Amalia, Noelia, and Aurelia came in, I dropped the Professora Ditadora act. “Did you guys enjoy the last 15 minutes?”

There was a chorus of “No…” but Jose’s “That was only 15 minutes?” was probably my favorite part.

“Okay guys, who knows what 25 de Abril is?”

“Dia de Portugal!” Valeria piped up.

“Close, but not quite.”

“Portuguese independence day?” Francisco asked.

“Close enough,” I said, before giving them a kid’s version of the crash course above.

“I treated you guys the way you would have been treated before April 25. Boys and girls were separated because they had different rights. Women couldn’t leave the country without their husband’s permission or vote unless they finished high school. That was pretty hard to do because only the first four years of school were free.”

“Yay, no school!” a student that will remain nameless (because I’m not that mean) cheered,

“Not really. 25% of people couldn’t read or write,” I replied. “That’s why I took Amalia and Noelia away. They went to work instead of going to school and learning to read and write. Even the people who could read couldn’t read what they wanted. The government had to approve it. That’s why I took away your books and phones. That’s called censorship.”

“What about Aurelia?” Francisco asked.

“The government also used a secret police to control people. I lied about there being a spy, but in real life, there could be a spy in your neighborhood, your school, even living with you. You would never know. People were so scared that they turned their friends in.”

Valeria squirmed in her seat.

“It’s okay, querida. You were scared and wanted to stay out of trouble. People lived with that for over forty years. It ended for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest ones was the army. Portugal had been fighting wars in their colonies in Africa.”

“My dad grew up there!” Sofia said.

“Yes, he did. Being a boy during the dictatorship wasn’t good, either. You had to be in the army for four years, and two of those had to be in Africa.”

Amaro piped up. “Our grandpa went to Africa! He cut hair in the army. Now he cuts ours.”

As worried as I was about this lesson, hearing my kids make these connections to our history as Portuguese-Americans made me glad that I did it. The 70s might feel like millions of years ago to them, but people they knew lived through those times.

“Your grandpa was lucky. Lots of people fought and died there. The army wasn’t happy about it. The people weren’t happy with not being free. The people couldn’t do much against the government because they were scared of the secret police. But the military knew that they could outnumber the government. So they took over Lisbon to kick out the government for the people. They were so happy that they gave the soldiers red carnations to put in their guns, since they didn’t need to fire them.”

“Ohhhh, so that’s why we got flowers,” Sofia said.

Teaching the Revolution in the Time of Trump

“So we should get the army to kick out Trump?” Francisco asked.

Ah yes, the inevitable Trump question, I thought. Having to avoid another meltdown while still telling the truth was going to be difficult.

“He’s only been president for 100 days, not for over 40 years. I don’t think he’s doing a good job, but things aren’t the same. You couldn’t meet in large groups during the dictatorship; that’s why I split you up. In America, we still have that right. It’s called freedom of assembly. We also still have freedom of the press and freedom of speech, so people can write and say whatever they want without the government censoring them. We might be fighting in the Middle East, but no one if forcing you to sign up for the army. We still have the right to vote for our leaders. We don’t have to wait for the army to change the government for us. You can vote for whoever you want when you turn 18.

“America isn’t perfect, Portugal isn’t perfect, but things were harder for your grandparents. Think about how lucky you are to not worry about your teacher spying on you… or hitting you for getting your schoolwork wrong.”

“What?!”

“Yep, it’s true. “Now, if there are no more history questions, let’s look at your homework.”

We spent the rest of the class going over -ir verbs, though I hope they remember the first part of class better because they have their whole lives to learn how to conjugate. I made their homework easy; ask your family what it was like before and during the revolution.

I’m not going to pretend that a couple of carnations made Portugal into a perfect democracy. Over 40 years later, they’re still coming to grips with the legacy of the Estado Novo. But that’s another blog post for another day.