About Celisa Canto 
I have been told it is time to write something about myself.
When people ask me how and when I started teaching Portuguese, I have to go back to my Conservatory time.
It all started as a hobby when I was just a 15-year-old piano and percussion student. In 1970, I had two foreign teachers, Peterson (percussionist) from the USA and Astor (timpanist) from Argentina. Both were having difficulties communicating with their students. Fortunately, I could already speak some English at that time, so they started to “use” me as their mediator, and I loved it, because the more I managed to interpret for them, the more I gained in self-confidence.
The Symphonic Orchestra of São Paulo paid Peterson for a Portuguese Course in the most famous language school in São Paulo at that time. After 3 months, he concluded he had learned much more during our percussion classes at the Conservatory than in his formal course. So, he came to me with a very challenging business proposition:
“Celisa, what about if you teach me Portuguese, and I give you extra drum classes?”
Together with Peterson, I started our unconventional Portuguese course. Since then, I have never stopped studying languages, which allowed me to continue teaching my beloved language to many wonderful people worldwide.
Some of my students did not speak any languages I could speak. This motivated me to successfully develop my teaching method, which allows me to teach Portuguese even when there is no common language between my students and myself.
In 1995, I travelled to Denmark where I lived for 5 years. There, I had the opportunity to teach not only Danes, but also Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Rumanian, Ukrainian, Chinese, African, Greek, and so on. It was when my method was put to the test. Our Portuguese course was in modules of 3 months each, and the school was deeply surprised with my students’ results – they were unbelievably exceptional. I have to admit that all my academic studies gave me neither the knowledge I needed nor the inspiration to teach my students. For this reason, I voluntarily confined myself to a language lab at Copenhagen University for two years to conduct my research in the cross-linguistic field of articulatory phonetics.
Besides português, I speak English, español, Dansk, and capisco un poco di italiano et français, which helps me immensely with my students.
In 2000, I came to Brazil to visit my family, and when I was visiting my dear son – Ícaro, in Florianópois, he insisted I should not return to Denmark, but rather stay here. It was a great idea, but I also got a bit confused because I had a great job in DK which I love very much. On top of it, there were very few foreigners down here. People would get surprised by my “teaching Portuguese as a foreign language” because they did not know the meaning of it, and in Lagoa da Conceição there was no one else teaching the subject at the time.
Little by little, Florianopolis started to be on the international media, and some of my former students from the 70’s to the 90’s discovered Florianopolis and came back to me. It has been 24 years since then and, here, I have taught more than 700 students from all 4 corners of the world. At the end of each course, most of my beloved students tell me they didn´t get a mere Portuguese course, but they became part of my culture.
As time goes by, I can see that my life is my students’ lives, and through them, I manage to travel around the world,
I learn a lot about their culture and people’s differences, above all, I understand them.
I love my teaching passionately and feel most fortunate for this.
I´m extremely grateful to my music teachers.