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Naval engineer Rodrigo Mota Amarante, 44, has spent most of the last two and a half decades teaching classes, from elementary school to graduate school. Formulas and subjects of chemistry, physics, and mathematics that involved vibrations of materials and fluid mechanics passed through his blackboard.
He was not safe from the impacts of the economic crisis on education, intensified by the arrival of the coronavirus. Amarante was one of the thousands of teachers laid off in private higher education during the pandemic.
The race, which began “unintentionally” by covering a teacher class in 1996, came to an abrupt halt on June 22 of this year.
“When I logged in, the ‘pop-up window’ [janela que abre no navegador]: you’re offline, “he says. “It is very cold. The semester was not over, there were colleagues who could not even put notes in the system,” he reports.
Pop-up in the university class system indicated the teacher’s dismissal – Photo: Personal Archive
Expansion of distance education
For Amarante, the dismissal was the result of a process that was already running in the behind the scenes of private higher education.
In December 2018, the Ministry of Education (MEC) issued an ordinance that allowed universities to build study plans for face-to-face courses with up to 40% of the workload in distance activities.
Distance education in all courses, without limit of hours, was extended until December 2021 by resolution of the National Council of Education (CNE), which advises the MEC on educational policies.
With that, it is possible to gather classes in the same virtual environment. Where two or three teachers were needed, for example, now one is enough.
“The teacher was seen as a cost. Individuals already wanted to expand distance education even before the pandemic, and whoever was teaching says there are now 200 students in virtual classrooms. How to teach in such an environment? How to answer questions? ”, Says Professor Rodrigo Amarante.
“Universities packed the halls and fired the professors,” he says.
Amarante says that teachers’ working hours were reduced to cut salaries. Whoever had four hours of classes a day, for example, now has three. He claims to have refused to sign a letter saying that he accepted the reduction. Months later, he was fired.
Uninove, in a note, states that “telepresence classes are being given with good evaluation by teachers and students, with smartphones and broadband for all teachers and a 20-giga chip for students as a benefit” and that they fully comply with the guidelines defined for the federal educational system, issued by the Ministry of Education – MEC “.
“Brazil does not value the teacher. Look at the strikes, how they treat him. They say: ‘he is blocking traffic’, or ‘this is a communist thing,'” he says.
“The students ask: teacher, do you work in addition to teaching?” He smiles. For him, among the phrases about the career that hurt him the most is: “Who knows how to do it, who does not know how to teach.”
“It’s the opposite,” argues Amarante. “Who knows is who teaches.”
Amarante received a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate in naval engineering, as well as a post-doctorate in mechanical engineering from USP.
But the job market for teachers presents challenges. The contests I entered were canceled or suspended. In private institutions, there are job cuts and wages are going down.
In addition to teaching, he worked with analysis of ship or platform designs and evaluated whether a structure was stable to be subjected to winds and waves from the sea. He also tested or simulated ideas that were never implemented.
“I don’t plan on acting as a teacher again in the next few years. I’m going to use what I know in a new profession: data scientist.”
He says he was able to replace himself and earned four times more salary than as a teacher.
For him, the idea that the teacher loves the profession only gets in the way.
“The first point to understand that a teacher is important is to stop the ‘glamorization’ of the profession, if it is not very easy for the employer to pay a low salary because ‘the teacher loves what he does'”, he reflects.
“The teacher’s passion is the talk on October 15. It became marketing.”
How much does a teacher cost
Rodrigo Amarante, 44 years old, undergraduate professor at a private university in SP. – Photo: Personal archive
Of the 384,400 higher education professors in Brazil, 210,600 (54.7%) teach at universities, colleges or private university centers throughout the country. Another 173.8 thousand (45.2%) are in the federal network.
Considering the two networks, the majority (89.3 thousand) teach part-time. Another 57.8 thousand have full-time contracts and 63.3 thousand per hour.
In the federal network, the base salary of full-time teachers more than R $ 4.4 thousand for those who do not have a master’s degree up to R $ 20,500 for those with PhDs, according to Andifes.
In the private sector, salaries vary from company to company. In 2019, the highest hourly rate was R $ 165.25 for professors with masters and doctorates, and payments are made proportionally, according to the hours of the day.
The lowest salary was R $ 29 per hour / class for teachers with master’s degrees. The data comes from a collaborative ranking, published on the website of the São Paulo Teachers Union (Sinpro-SP) and brings information from 44 higher education institutions.
Data from the General Registry of Employees and Unemployed (Caged) indicate that there were 1.8 million education workers in January 2020. The balance, in August, is 17,589 fewer vacancies.
Month-by-month data show that layoffs in education were higher than hiring in April. – Photo: Infografia / G1
The layoffs were concentrated in the private network. There were no cuts in federal universities during the pandemic, says Edward Madureira, president of the National Association of Directors of Federal Institutions of Higher Education (Andifes).
