Slowly, something shifted. The children became more present. The teachers reported less burnout. The parentheses weren’t losing time; they were creating presence .
Daniel Brailovsky’s Pedagogía entre paréntesis is not a technique you can buy in a teacher’s supply catalog. It’s an attitude. It’s the pedagogical equivalent of taking a breath before answering. It’s the courage to say, "Let’s set aside our plan for a moment and really see who is here."
Brailovsky, she remembered, wasn’t interested in grand educational manifestos or rigid step-by-step methods. Instead, he proposed a subtle, almost invisible shift in the act of teaching. Imagine, he wrote, that everything you think you know about teaching—the authority, the lesson plan, the expected outcome—is placed inside a parenthesis. That parenthesis is not an erasure. It’s a suspension. It’s a temporary pause on the urgency of "covering content" so that something else can emerge.
In the end, Clara wrote on the whiteboard of the teachers’ lounge: "The parenthesis is not an interruption of learning. It is learning’s native language." daniel brailovsky pedagogia entre parentesis
The results were subtle at first. A math teacher put the fraction worksheet in parentheses to ask, "If you could share your sandwich with anyone in the world, how would you cut it?" A history teacher paused a lecture on the May Revolution to let a student finish a rambling connection to a video game. A physical education teacher stopped a soccer game to ask, "How do you know when someone really needs the ball?"
For fifteen minutes, the class explored perspective, empathy, observation, and even basic geometry (the spots on the ladybug’s back). Then, just as naturally, Laura closed the parenthesis. She returned to the lesson on native plants, but now the children were leaning forward, curious, connected.
The story Brailovsky often told was about a primary school teacher named Laura. One morning, instead of launching into the scheduled lesson on native plants, Laura noticed a child staring at a ladybug on the windowsill. The class schedule said: Science, 9:00–9:45, Unit 3 . But Laura opened a parenthesis. She put the lesson plan in parentheses and asked, "What do you think the ladybug sees right now?" Slowly, something shifted
Brailovsky argued that Pedagogía entre paréntesis is not about abandoning structure, but about trusting the interval. The parenthesis is a sacred, fragile space where the teacher stops being the sole transmitter of knowledge and becomes a co-listener. It’s where the unexpected question, the silence, the mistake, or the detour becomes the real curriculum.
In a noisy, brightly colored elementary school in Buenos Aires, a group of teachers sat in a circle during their weekly planning meeting. They were stuck. The new curriculum was dense, the assessment deadlines were looming, and the word "discipline" kept surfacing like a ghost they couldn’t exorcise. One teacher, Clara, sighed. "We’re teaching at the children," she said, "not with them."
And so, in that small school in Buenos Aires, a silent revolution began—one parenthesis at a time. The parentheses weren’t losing time; they were creating
Back in the teachers’ circle, Clara shared the idea. At first, the other teachers were skeptical. "We don’t have time for parentheses," said Marcelo, pointing at the packed annual plan. But Clara proposed a small experiment: each day, each teacher would intentionally open just one parenthesis for no more than ten minutes. No agenda. Just a genuine question, an observation, or a pause to follow a child’s curiosity.
That afternoon, Clara recalled a text from her university days, a yellowed photocopy by the Argentine pedagogue . The title was strange: Pedagogía entre paréntesis — Pedagogy in Parentheses.
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