dear son peter…
as I described…. on my previous email…
how much thankful I am to my mother…
for being so kind and careful… to the point of motivating me…
to be a person who loves to study …
as I was describing that… I forgot to say…
that during the process of “becoming a person who loves to study”…
there exists a fase-of-transition… a fase in which…
there’s a kind of “pain-feeling”…
a fase where the child suffers…
as he realizes how difficult it is… to conform himself…
with the idea of letting-go the innocent life of a child…
and to move on towards an acceptance of the discomfort…
typical of the earliest stages of a process-of- learning…
such transition happened exactly at the time we are talking about…
at age ten… on amelia street…
where I was enjoying so much the opportunity…
to walk barefoot on the dirt… among all those trees…
of my grandmother’s house…
( as opposed to a life inside an apartment…
…where we used to live in rio-de-janeiro…)
my parents and my brothers had arrived from rio to amelia street…
in recife… right in the middle of the big-summer-vacation…
( that is:… december, january, february…
since summer here on the south-hemisphere happens…
in an opposite-period of the north-hemisphere-summer…)
my family had arrived right in the middle of summer vacation…
and… since my mother realized that I used to stay all day…
doing nothing…
she decided to put me to study… on summer-time-vacation…
she told me to sit on the living-room table…
she gave me a note-book… pencil… and an eraser…
and told me that I was supposed to… everyday…
do about fifty or seventy math exercises…
from a book of math… called “Ary Quintella”…
( which was the author’s name…)
I couldn’t believe on what was happening…
me…?... would I have to spend my vacations studying…
… all these boring exercises…?
oh… what a torture… what a crazy idea…
I sat on that chair in front of that notebook… of that book…
I felt so bad…
I felt like complaining…
why… it has to be me…?
why… I have to study…?
right on vacation…?
my mother noted my anguish…
and… calmly… got a scratch-paper…
and… started to explain to me… how to do the exercises…
and… from those explanations…
I realized that I would be able to do them by myself…
so… what seemed first… to be a torture…
turned out to be something good… to be a pleasure…
I found myself doing the other exercises…
like I was doing something fun…
a game… an amusement…
in short… that is the magic of the pleasure-of-studying…
once the student gets a “jump-start” from somebody…
after that… the student realizes that he’s capable…
of standing- on- his- own- two- feet…
and… this feeling of independency…
makes him feel good…
gives him a desire to keep moving on…
to keep developing himself…
--- --- ---
in those days the structure of the brazilian- school- system was:
1… the primary-school… from age 6 to 10…
2… the gymnasium-school… from age 11 to 14…
3… the scientific-school… from age 15 to 17…
usually… at age 18… the student was making an effort to pass…
the “vestibular” exam… in order to get into college…
since it was a very hard exam…
usually… the students used to enroll themselves…
in the famous “little-schools”… which offered preparatory courses…
specialized on getting everybody “in shape” for the “vestibular”…
--- --- ---
well…
but… why am I talking about all that…?
because on those days… since I was ten-years-old…
I was right on the border between the primary and gymnasium schools…
well… depending on the educational-prestige of the gymnasium-school…
where the student was intending to apply…
if... the school was good… with a high educational level…
then… the interested student was required to take an entrance-exam…
which was… usually… very hard…
( it was like a sort of a… “little- vestibular”…
but… in this case… from the primary-school to the gymnasium-school…
instead of… from the scientific-school to college )…
so…
one day I saw some kids passing by on the street wearing an uniform…
it seemed like they were masqueraded as little-soldiers…
in a light-brown uniform…
… two red-vertical-stripes along the outer-vertical-line of the trousers…
… a little red hat… ( the famous “cap” of the stewardesses…)
matching with the red stripes of the trousers…
I found it… superb…
children…
masqueraded as true little soldiers…
I asked my mother which uniform was that…
she explained to me that they were students from the “colegio-militar”…
a good school… with an good educational-system…
she asked me if I would like to apply there…
and to try to take the entrance-exam to this school…
I said… yes…
very happy to know… that I was about to enroll myself…
in a school… where the uniforms of the students…
looked like the little-soldiers of the real-world…
and from this point on…
a new trajectory in my life… just initiated…
where… later on… I begin to feel an enormous regret…
for having this (unfortunate) idea of enrolling myself…
in a school… where the students masquerade themselves…
as little-tin-soldiers…
… with the red cap…
we stop here…
my dear sons…
stay with God…
all-the-best…
super-hug…
your father…
…luis antonio…