When Giovanna Lorenzi Pinto decided to move to the United States to pursue a higher education, she did not know she would end up teaching at McCallum. Born and raised in Mauá, a small city within Sao Paulo, a state in southeastern Brazil, she and her family moved to Tupã at 16 and lived there until she was 21. Pinto along with her husband and 1-year-old daughter have been living in the United States since July 2021.  

Pinto, the first in her family to go to college, is also the first to come to the United States. After graduating from UNESP in Tupã, she decided to pursue a Ph. D in postsecondary success at Texas State University. She is very close to finishing her degree.

When choosing a university, she applied to two in Florida, one in Kansas and one in Texas. She ultimately chose Texas State because of it higher salary. When she moved to Texas, Pinto spoke little to no English, which presented a difficult challenge. 

During her first years of her doctoral program, Pinto and her husband lived in San Marcos to be close to the college because she had an apprenticeship with a professor while she was there.  

“I had an apprenticeship to do research and only research, and I thought I would do research with studying along the way,” she said. “But then I switched my apprenticeship to teaching. I essentially would teach a university seminar about what the university offers and learning strategies they can apply.” 

After living in San Marcos for three years, she and her husband moved to Round Rock, where she began to apply to teach at schools. Austin ISD was the only district that accepted the type of work visa she had. McCallum accepted Pinto’s application and asked her to teach Business Information Management and Money Matters as part of the Career Technical Education pathway.

After living in Austin for four years, Pinto said it’s gotten easier for her to speak and understand people. She now speaks nearly fluent English. She took one year of English classes before she applied for scholarships. Despite her language proficiency, she still encountered challenges. 

“I have to do everything for my husband because he doesn’t speak English,” she said, “so I have to go with him to the doctor and things all the time, which was very hard at the beginning. Now he’s better, but it was hard because I had to deal with both of our lives.” 

At first, she felt she was thrown into a whole new world, a world in which she couldn’t understand anybody, even when she was apprenticing at the university. 

“I remember my first class, my professor asked me to close the door, and I didn’t understand him,” she said. “Now I can understand better, but I have trouble explaining myself sometimes.” 

With her Ph. D almost finished, she expects to graduate in the fall of 2025 and hopes to become a university professor within five years.

“I want to work first in a school so I can understand how the system works here and help students better when I am working at the university,” she said. 

To stay on track with her Ph. D schedule, Pinto teaches a full day of classes and goes home to her family, and once her daughter is settled in bed, she resumes her studies.

“I can’t wait to be done,” she said. “It’s so much work. I just want to relax one weekend without anything in my head.” 

After completing her Ph. D Pinto hopes to stay at McCallum for at least another year to gain more teaching experience and learn more about how to become a better teacher. 

Lia Ferrante, a first-year teacher like Pinto and the recipient of McCallum’s Teacher of Promise Award for the 2024-2025 school year, teaches world geography classes in the classroom next to Pinto. 

Ferrante prepared for her full-time teaching job by student teaching, and Ferrante had a lot of student teaching experience because she was a long-term sub at Bowie High School, teaching both government and world geography. 

Ferrante believes that even though she had a lot of experience before becoming a teacher, the training is no substitute for the realities of being a teacher. For Pinto, teaching proved much harder because she had no student teaching experience except for her apprenticeship at Texas State. 

“No teaching program can ever prepare you, and no philosophy coming in can prepare you for classroom management and how to deal with the unexpected in your classroom,” Ferrante said. “So I think we both sort of navigated that and asked each other for advice.” 

Ferrante and Pinto, both first-year teachers, had to adjust to the demands of a school day and were in the same boat on the first day. 

“I remember on the first day of school, it was a B-Day and neither of us had a fifth period, so we were both eagerly awaiting our first time ever teaching, and helping each other be confident in that,” Ferrante said. 

While Ferrante and Pinto teach different subjects and classes, they still rely on each other for help and chat between classes. 

“A lot of times we’ll let each other in each other’s rooms, and she’ll do me favors,” Ferrante said. “I’ll do her favors, and it’s nice to have that camaraderie. When we need to collaborate we collaborate, when we need to rely on each other, we rely on each other, so just being there for one another.” 

As Ferrante has observed Pinto as a friend and a teacher throughout the year, she acknowledges the hard work she puts in within school and outside of the classroom. 

“A a person, she’s one of, if not the single most hard-working teacher here,” Ferrante said. “She, in addition to teaching two classes, has a family at home, including a young child, and she’s working on her education and her dissertation. So in addition to being a mother and all of that, she’s also a teacher, which is an incredible feat that she can manage.” 

Junior Selene Medina said Pinto has easily become one of her favorite teachers. 

“My first impression of Ms. Pinto was that she was so sweet and welcoming to everybody,” Medina said. “She has a very structured class, and I think she has done a great job as a new teacher.” 

Medina said she and her friends occasionally chat with Pinto and have been able to invite her to some of their sporting events. 

“Ms. Pinto likes to engage with all of her students, so me and my friends like to talk to her about what’s going on in our lives, especially with sports,” she said. “We invite her to a bunch of our sporting events, like cheerleading, which she has come to before. It’s amazing to have encouraging teachers [like Pinto] around the McCallum campus.”  

One thing her students and fellow teachers may not know about her, is that Pinto was a competitive gymnast back in Brazil from ages 8 to 15, and then began playing volleyball in high school, which led to her being recruited to play in college.

Volleyball in Brazil is different from the way it is in the U.S. Players have the chance to play for city teams because the schools themselves do not have teams, so people get the chance to play with other people across the city, and then against other city teams. 

Pinto played with the city team, and then she was accepted into a college where they were recruiting people for the team, and she was selected to play. She didn’t know anybody who had played volleyball at the college but decided to give it a try. The balance of playing a sport in college and the orientation of college in Brazil differs vastly from the U.S. because students attend classes in the evening. 

“So I worked all day, and then from like 6 o’clock I went to the University,” she said. “Then I was taking classes from 6 to 10, and then I was playing [volleyball] from 10 to midnight.”

With her extensive volleyball schedule during college, she also worked a full-time job. She worked in manufacturing, as a warehouse manager in a factory that made glass lenses. 

Pinto and her husband have been able to find a group of Brazilian friends that they hang out with a lot, which has given her a connection with her culture, as she is over 5,000 miles away from home. 

“That’s why we are still here [in Austin], because we have those people,” she said. 

She sees herself living somewhere else in the U.S. in the future but has no plans to leave soon.

“We have friends, we know the area and we are adjusted to it,” she said. “I think moving to another state would be more expensive, and maybe the money is not worth it if we move.”  

So far at McCallum, Pinto has enjoyed teaching her classes and has been able to connect with her students and fellow teachers, who have been open to helping. 

“I think the students are always understanding my challenges, and they’re all always open to help me, and the staff members,” she said. 

UPDATE: As of March 14, Pinto has returned to Brazil to renew her student visa, and plans to stay there for 1-2 months before returning. Her plans to continue teaching at McCallum are up in the air.