Life as an English Teacher in Brazil

The Brazil language school schedule

Brazil’s language school schedule is split: morning corporate sessions (typically 7:30am–12pm) and evening adult classes (6pm–9pm). The middle of the day — 12pm–6pm — is free. In São Paulo, this means afternoons in a city with 12,000 restaurants, world-class street art, and a coffee culture built around good espresso at R$5–8. In Rio, afternoons on Ipanema or Copacabana beach before the evening classes. In Florianópolis, afternoons on one of the island’s 42 beaches.

Brazilian culture: warmth, music, and “jeitinho brasileiro”

Brazilians are among the world’s most demonstrably warm, physically expressive, and socially generous people — and this is not tourist-brochure language. The hug as a standard greeting. The immediate first-name basis. The invitation to join a table. The conversation that extends far beyond its original purpose. The “jeitinho brasileiro” — the Brazilian way — a cultural willingness to find an improvised solution, bend a rule with a smile, and make something work through personal relationship rather than formal process. This warmth is genuine and extends to foreign teachers who make any effort to speak Portuguese and engage with Brazilian life.

Brazil is a musical country in a way that is difficult to convey to people who have only heard Brazilian music as background. Samba is not a party music — it is a cultural practice built around improvised lyrics, competitive community performance (the samba school tradition), and a rhythmic vocabulary that took decades and multiple diasporic musical traditions to develop. Baio is the Northeast’s accordion-and-triangle driven music of longing and celebration. Axé is Salvador’s Carnival rhythm. Forró brings people into close-partner dance in ways that blur geographic and social boundaries. MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) produced Jobim, Gil, Caetano, and Veloso — musicians whose work is globally canonical. Living in Brazil means living inside this music.

The cultural diversity of Brazil is extraordinary — and unlike any other country in Latin America. The world’s largest Japanese diaspora (São Paulo’s Liberdade district). Germany and Italy of the South (Curitiba, Blumenau, the Gramado highlands). Lebanon’s largest diaspora outside the Middle East (reflected in São Paulo’s Arab food culture). The Afro-Brazilian traditions of the Northeast. The indigenous nations of the Amazon. All of this is Brazilian — and all of it is alive and expressed in food, music, religion, and social practice across the country.

Brazilian food culture

Brazilian food is extraordinary in its range and its everyday accessibility. The por-kilo restaurant — where you fill your plate from a buffet and pay by weight — is the great democratic equaliser of Brazilian food culture. A por-kilo lunch of well-prepared Brazilian dishes costs R$25–50 in most cities and provides better quality food than the tourist-oriented restaurants charge three times as much for.

Essential Brazilian eating experiences: feijoada — the national dish of black beans slow-cooked with pork cuts, served with rice, farofa (toasted manioc flour), orange slices, and couve (sautéed kale). Traditionally served on Saturdays. The churrasco — Brazilian barbecue, where endless rotating skewers of beef, lamb, pork, and chicken come to your table on metal swords until you turn your double-sided disc from green to red. Pão de queijo — cheese bread made with manioc starch; warm from the oven, addictive, ubiquitous. Açaí from the Amazon — the purple berry that Brazilian athletes eat with banana, granola, and guarana syrup for energy. Caipirinhas — the national cocktail of cachaça (sugarcane spirit), lime, and sugar; one of the world’s great drinks at one of the world’s most affordable prices.

Carnaval: the defining Brazilian experience

Carnaval in Brazil is genuinely the world’s largest party — not as a marketing claim but as a measurable fact. An estimated 7–9 million tourists visit Rio alone during Carnaval week. The samba school parade at Rio’s Sambadrome — where each school (actually a community organisation representing a neighbourhood or community) parades for approximately 80 minutes with 3,000–5,000 performers in elaborately choreographed costumes and floats, all to a single original samba composed specifically for that year’s parade — is one of the world’s great performance events.

The street Carnaval — the blocos — is where most Brazilians actually celebrate: neighbourhood samba bands leading crowds of thousands through city streets, everyone in costume or simply dancing, lasting from morning to night for the entire Carnaval period. In Rio, there are hundreds of blocos across the city. In Salvador, Carnaval is organised around trios elétricos — enormous trucks with bands playing on top, surrounded by dancing crowds. In Recife/Olinda, frevo music and giant puppets (bonecos). Every region does Carnaval differently, and each is extraordinary in its own way.

For teachers: Carnaval week means schools close. Plan around it — it is an extraordinary cultural experience that every teacher in Brazil should experience at least once. It also means no income for that week. If you’re budgeting monthly income from teaching, factor in the Carnaval pause. And plan accommodation months in advance — Rio during Carnaval is fully booked by October.

Travel from Brazil

Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world. Travel within Brazil is an adventure in itself — internal flights are affordable when booked ahead, and the country’s geographic diversity means that weekend and holiday trips from any teaching base offer genuinely different landscapes and cultures.

• From São Paulo: Paraty (colonial coastal town, 3 hours) · Ilhabela (island, 3 hours) · Rio (5 hours by bus or 1 hour by flight) · Iguazu Falls (1.5 hours by flight; one of the world’s great natural wonders) · Florianópolis (1 hour by flight or 8 hours by bus)
• From Rio: Petrópolis (imperial mountain retreat, 1 hour) · Búzios (Caribbean-like peninsula, 3 hours) · Parati (cobblestone colonial port, 4 hours) · São Paulo (5 hours or 1 hour flight)
• Amazon access: Manaus (fly from any major city; the Amazon experience from boat trips to pink dolphins is 30 minutes from the city centre) · Belém (mouth of the Amazon; extraordinary river culture)
• Northeast coast: Fortaleza, Natal, Maceio — among the world’s finest beaches with warm Atlantic waters
• Iguazu Falls: Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay border; one of the world’s most spectacular natural sights; accessible from São Paulo or Curitiba in 1.5 hours by flight

What teachers actually experience in Brazil