Hello everyone! Welcome back to reading Panther Press! To begin the year, I've decided to interview Mr. Luiz Coelho, our newest Upper School math teacher.
PP: Why did you choose to become a teacher?
LC: Since I was 19 or 20, I was already teaching pre-college and college classes, so I've always liked to teach. I also like the environment of the classroom and learning from my students. You engage in interesting conversations in order to learn mutually. When it comes to teaching more advanced classes, I don't have all the answers to the content, therefore, allowing me to have a deeper connection with my students.
PP: If you weren't a teacher, which profession would you have chosen, and why? Have you had any jobs that weren't related to teaching?
LC: Some people might not know this, but I serve a parish on Sunday in a church that is the equivalent to the Anglican Church. We tend to say that we're like Catholic light because it contains all the trappings of Catholicism but the theology is much more liberal in many aspects. I do have degrees in some fields. I have a bachelor's in theology and a doctorate in liturgy, which is what I studied at the University of Sewanee. I would do that full-time if possible, but I would still be teaching something, even if it's for free.
PP: What is that one place you've always wanted to travel to?
LC: I've always wanted to travel to the Solomon Islands. I got to know an Anglican religious order called the Melanesian Brotherhood through the church. It is an Anglican religious order and a large part of them was murdered by a dictator there because they were trying to bring peace to the Solomon Islands. I got to meet some of the survivors and was so impressed by that place, and by the work of those religious groups, and what the population did to end that Civil War. Polynesia, Melanesia, I would love to know those places in general, the beaches and islands with their many different cultures.
PP: What are the hobbies you perform outside of your job?
LC: You'll find me in church on Sundays in Laranjeiras, but on top of that, I go to the gym and am a semi-professional recurve archer. This is the type of archery you'll usually see in the Olympics and I really love it. It's a major challenge because it's all about physics and math: there's a strength, there is the elevational part, but what you're really doing is you need to replicate the same movement all the time. I've done sports throughout my life, for instance, when I was in the army, I was a marathon runner. I've always competed in some sort of individual sport, since I'm not the best at the collective ones.
PP: Do you believe that math was discovered or invented?
LC: I always say that math exists in nature and people started realizing where the patterns were later on, so, in that sense, I think it has more to do with being discovered and not invented. For instance, the patterns of math appear in flowers, chemical reactions, architecture, and when you notice how the stars move, that field has a lot to do with natural sciences. Math is just a way to come up with an abstraction that explains it all. Math was just discovered by people, and people then create abstractions to try to explain that to use it for something else. It has come to a point (in terms of research in math) that some researchers are developing material that only years from now somebody's going to find an application for, but math, in most cases, has an application, so it is just something you come up with that you realize it exists in real life.
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