Vanessa Agra

Vanessa is Brazilian and has been living in San Francisco, CA for 9 years. She graduated in Psychology in Brazil, and was an elementary school teacher before moving to the United States. While living in Brazil, Vanessa accumulated six years of experience teaching Portuguese and other subjects to 1st- 4th graders. In San Francisco she took a different path and diversified her professional endeavors. But Vanessa has never stopped teaching Portuguese as a second language because of the joy and fun she always finds in the process of seeing someone open up his/her ears and mind into a different language.

Vanessa enjoys teaching Portuguese firstly because she loves the Portuguese language itself, with its detailed line of thinking and beautifully constructed sentences full of adjectives.  Moreover, she loves the language learning process in general, and recognizes that while it is incredibly gratifying to learn a language, it is also very challenging and requires hard work. She believes that learning a foreign language means much more than achieving the most obvious result which is to communicate; but also, and maybe most importantly, it means to expose one’s consciousness to a diverse point of view, a foreign way to see life and the world. It broadens one’s belief system, and polishes his/her ability to make judgments in life.