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Palmer Trinity School senior Julia da Costa is the school’s Silver Knight nominee in the Foreign Language category.
For the last three years, da Costa has been teaching English to a Brazilian student.
“She is a freshman now,” da Costa says. “I think I started with her when she was in sixth or seventh grade. I try my best to tutor her once a week.”
She was paired with the girl because she was the one in the club who spoke English the most fluently as well as Portuguese.
Da Costa says the student she tutors was more advanced in English.
“She knew most vocab words, and knew most of the grammar,” da Costa says. “Now we are working on phrasing and pronunciation. I’ve been challenging her by asking her to tell stories.”
What’s been challenging for da Costa is teaching someone her own language.
“We subconsciously just speak,” da Costa says. “How do I convey that message clearly?
How do I make her understand? I’ve had to adapt my lessons to the way she thinks.”
She says the most rewarding part of the program is the relationship she has with her student.
“Being able to connect with my own culture through somebody who is around my age and is in the country my family is from, it’s been very rewarding to see her succeed,” da Costa says.
Da Costa says she’d love to continue to tutor the student in college depending on her schedule.
She started tutoring through a program run at Palmer Trinity called Brazil with an S which was started by a now graduated student.
She was happy to join because her family is from Brazil and she tries her best to go back to Brazil every couple of years.
“I spoke Portuguese growing up,” da Costa says. “I learned English through school.”
She speaks not only English and Portuguese, but Spanish as well. Julia da Costa takes French at school, and she wants to learn Italian.
At Palmer Trinity, her main extracurricular activity is theater. Last year, she played Maria in The Sound of Music.
Recently, she performed in an original one act play in the theater competition.
“Our director, she wrote an original play,” da Costa says. “We performed it for judges. It was selected to go to the state competition. We are going to be performing in Tampa.”
She’s co-president of Women Empowerment, a club that partners with the women’s shelter, Lotus House.
“We do volunteering with them and do a lot of bake sales to raise funds for them,” she says. “We have also raised funds for MAYA, a school in Guatemala, that facilitates young girls graduating from high school.”
She is also in several honor societies, including the French Honor Society and Tri-M., the musical honor society. She plays violin in the orchestra.
Da Costa is co-president of the Melody Initiative. Club members raise money for The Miami Music Program.
“The Miami Music Project helps kids that are underprivileged or not succeeding in high school,” she says. “They have a crazy 100 success graduation rate for their students.”
She is also a Peer Counselor at Palmer Trinity. This is her second year working with the younger students. She has a seventh-grade advisory board she meets with regularly.
She’s also a student ambassador so she leads tours for prospective students and families.
Her college list includes Boston College, the University of Virginia, the University of Florida, the University of Richmond, Wake Forest University and more. She hasn’t decided on a major yet.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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