It's amazing how the same exact lesson can turn out entirely differently depending on the dynamic of a classroom and the energy of a group of students. In one a disastrous failure, in another a complete success.
I'm learning, I guess? With each week I'm able to pick out more individual students, make out personalities, get a better sense of the energy, capacities, and limits of each group.
I have one class at Galilei where the students are moderately rowdy, but the real problem is that the teacher causes more disturbance than anyone. It's like she tries to sabotage me, every lesson. Last week she was popping in and out of the classroom throughout the lesson, taking advantage of my presence to take care of all her little errands. Then halfway through she sat down at the desk at the front of the room and started calling students up one by one to chat, loudly, about some other assignments or god-knows-what. This is while I'm speaking, or trying to encourage students to speak, mind you. I struggle to make myself heard above the noise even when it's just her, though it's rarely just her; as you can probably imagine, students have little incentive to keep quiet when their teacher herself is causing a commotion. Even the students tried several times to shush her, to which she responded by blowing up at them, yelling that if she were speaking loudly, it was only because they were making noise and forced her to raise her volume.
When students tried to shush each other, she barked that they were behaving terribly, only that she wasn't going to do anything about it, she was just going to observe and carry out her revenge on them in the form of interrogations later. Well, great, that works for you, but it doesn't really help me get through my lesson, does it?
Today she parked herself in the back row and proceeded to strike up a casual conversation with the entire row of students, again at an above-normal volume, that carried on throughout the hour. Again you can imagine the reverberations on the rest of the classroom. If the teacher doesn't take my lessons seriously, why on earth should the students?
"Starting next time we're doing literature!" she barks, both at me and at them. She and all the other English teachers I've encountered here have this idea that unless you're doing literature, it's not "serious" enough. Forget activities, conversation, group work -- don't even breathe the word "games."
They're all obsessed with making sure my lessons are "serious" enough, and they're all convinced that teaching literature is the only way to be "serious." Okay, fine. But what literature they're determined to shove down these kids' throats!
Last week one of my teachers came up to me after my American high schools lesson and said, "That was fine, but now we'll do literature, no? I was thinking. Hawthorne."
Oh, right, of course. Because these are kids who can't remember to say "When does American school finish?" instead of "When American school finishes?" Pronounced fee.-NEESH-ezz. These are kids who don't know the words "guess," or "share," or "organize." Neither they nor their teachers know that "straight" can mean heterosexual or that "place" can be a verb. Clearly, The Scarlet Letter is the next logical step.
Uh, this is the kind of assertion to which WTF?!? is the only natural response.
I have nothing against literature; in fact, if you know me at all, you'll know I love literature. But I've also studied plenty of languages, and it's totally obvious to me that literature is no way to learn a language. I learned way more Italian in a few weeks of dating an Italian than in a year of reading Italian literature. I loved The Decameron and I remember its contents well, but I don't think I could tell you a single word of Italian I learned from it. It just doesn't work that way.
I don't know why all of Italy's language teachers have latched onto this idea. Haven't they noticed that their students are incapable of carrying on a fluid conversation in English at the most basic, basic (tipo, "What did you do this weekend?") level? Why do they insist on trotting out Beowulf and Hamlet and Paradise Lost and this universal "Oh, you're American? Let's do Hawthorne!" absurdity?
How about let's not do Hawthorne. Do you want the kids to hate English forever? Because sometimes it really seems like that's the goal. Reading The Scarlet Letter was like pulling teeth for my 11th-grade classmates, and we were native speakers. Seriously, you thought waterboarding was unpleasant... watch me inflict The Scarlet Letter on my 17 year-old Italians. Sometimes you wish you could just shake people, you know?
***
Anyway, at the end of third period today, after an hour with the barker, I felt so discouraged and out of control. And then my last class of the day, 4B, was totally wonderful and completely re-energized me.
This class is one of my two favorites, both fourth-year classes, so 17- and 18- year-olds, at Galilei. 4B and 4G. I don't know why, since the group of students never changes classrooms, but in essentially all of the classes I teach there are several more banchi (two-person tables) than there are students. Usually, as you'd expect, students fill in the back rows and leave the front row, sometimes the first couple of rows, empty. In 4B at Galilei, it's the opposite -- they'll all cram in, four or five to a table, at the front of the room, during my class. (All boys, by the way; and Galilei is two-thirds boys in general.) I'm not sure whether it's just my classes or every class, but in any case, they're darling. The boys in the first row are piled on top of each other like a litter of puppies, limbs askew, folded over their desks with their faces turned upwards at me, leaning on each other's shoulders. They look up at me with these big puppy eyes that never leave me the entire hour, hanging on my every word. They jump up to erase the board or get me chalk or shush each other or ask me questions. There's one boy in particular who stares at me so intently and looks away so sheepishly whenever I look at him, it's hard to keep a straight face.
Ahh, teacher crushes. Believe me, I know them better than anyone. It's kinda fun to be on the other side for once.
(On a side note, not to be inappropriate, but it's astonishing how good-looking many of these Sicilian boys are. I'd say like two-thirds of my students are as attractive as the top two or three most popular boys of my high school. Listening to them read their compositions on "If I went to high school in America..." it was hard not to think, Damn, if you went to school in America, teenage girls would be lining up to give you their phone numbers. I'm just saying.)
***
Yesterday the Consul General from the Naples consulate was in Palermo and deigned to grace me with his presence. We met for a bite to eat at the Foccacceria San Francesco, a cute little restaurant that's famous because its owner was the first to publicly denounce the pizzo (the money the Mafia asks of the business owners in the area it controls, in exchange for "protection") and point out in court the individuals who asked him to pay it. Now the owner has an entourage of police protection that accompanies him everywhere; the Naples consulate has helped him through the bureaucratic process of opening a branch of the restaurant in New York, and he'll soon relocate there to actually open the thing. And to escape this mouse-in-a-cage lifestyle he's stuck in here. Hopefully the restaurant succeeds, despite the dismal economic climate, so he can stay over there.
So, fun times with the CG. I know him from when I did my internship there at the consulate, and he's a fellow Brown alum, so naturally we have this deep spiritual bond. Except that I ended up having to eat pane con la milza, which is this gross liver/boiled meat/innards concoction, eaten with bread, that's basically the typical dish of this area, and everyone here is crazy about it. I feel like it would be unappetizing to me even if I weren't a vegetarian, so obviously given that I am a vegetarian I had no desire to try it.
Whenever Sicilians find out you're foreign, they always want to talk about food, and ask whether you like Sicilian food, and then the first thing they inevitably ask is whether you've tried pane con la milza, and I always have to explain that no, I'm a vegetarian; yes, I know it sounds crazy; unfortunately I have to miss out on exquisite delicacies like milza. Now, at least, I can skip over the explanation and just reply that yes, I've tried it.
This was the sort of situation where the owner came out and greeted us, and instead of taking our orders they brought out a fixed array of dishes, and it was all on the house, so I felt pressured to eat what they gave me so as not to appear rude. It's happened fairly often here in Italy that people invite me over for dinner or generously offer me food without thinking to ask whether I eat meat, since vegetarianism is a pretty foreign concept for most, and I feel too timid or embarrassed to refuse it. So, it kind of grosses me out, but I've ended up eating meat a few times here. Oh well, I'd hate to seem snotty or ungrateful. So anyway, milza can now be crossed off the list.
Another thing: the CG does alumni interviewing for Brown here in Italy, and he said he usually gets 4 or 5 applicants a year to interview, usually Italian kids with one American parent. I wonder if it's too late to sign up for this year; it'd be fun to interview kids for Brown, and it'd be interesting to see what sorts of Italian kids apply.
A year or two ago I never thought I'd become the sort of alum who'd be volunteering for alumni interviewing, or going back for Commencement, or donating to the Annual Fund, or attending dumb Ivy League alumni cocktail parties in San Francisco. Yet here I am. Graduating from college does weird things to you. Next thing you know, I'll be dressing my baby up in little Brown outfits -- or no, better yet, as Bruno the Bear for Halloween -- and turning out annually for the Harvard football game. Well, let's hope it doesn't quite come to that.
Then yesterday after CG time it was Italo's birthday so we went to dinner at this darling little place that serves typical Sicilian food and to which I will surely bring anyone and everyone who comes to visit me -- so remember it, it's called Cucina. Like Kitchen in Novato, the name is so vague that I fear I won't be able to remember. Plus he brought me some leftover wildberry mousse cake thing that his mother made for the occasion that was amazing, and by the end of the night I wanted to die of fullness, though it was all, with the exception of the milza, very delightful.
Plus Paola was kind enough to come pick up my laundry and return it all clean and freshly scented and neatly folded and newly lovely -- like my own personal laundry service. So as you can see I'm just a pig in mud over here.
Is that even an expression? It's so weird how your English leaves you when you're not around native speakers for a while. Well not basic English, obviously, but colloquial expressions. Like yesterday I was trying to think of the one about memory and elephants: elephants never forget? or is it singular: an elephant never forgets? or like in Italian, so-and-so has a memory like an elephant? or like my favorite Agatha Christie book, Elephants Can Remember? I've gotten myself all mixed up.
All right, there's more to say, much of it probably not particularly compelling but by now you've probably realized I write this more to keep my thoughts from boiling over and to keep track of where the hell my time goes, rather than as any sort of coherent or informative account for an outside reader, so I'll write my nonsense and my minutiae and my scatterbrained musings whether you like it or not. But for now I ought to go to bed or do something productive like review the Glorious Revolution for tomorrow morning. Remind me to tell you about Grazia and the Marcos and Grazia's Welsh friend. And I finally took some photos of Paola's place that I'll have to look through and post. Until soon, ragazzi.
Un abbraccio forte forte e un bacio enorme enorme.
Until tomorrow.
So, fun times with the CG. I know him from when I did my internship there at the consulate, and he's a fellow Brown alum, so naturally we have this deep spiritual bond. Except that I ended up having to eat pane con la milza, which is this gross liver/boiled meat/innards concoction, eaten with bread, that's basically the typical dish of this area, and everyone here is crazy about it. I feel like it would be unappetizing to me even if I weren't a vegetarian, so obviously given that I am a vegetarian I had no desire to try it.
Whenever Sicilians find out you're foreign, they always want to talk about food, and ask whether you like Sicilian food, and then the first thing they inevitably ask is whether you've tried pane con la milza, and I always have to explain that no, I'm a vegetarian; yes, I know it sounds crazy; unfortunately I have to miss out on exquisite delicacies like milza. Now, at least, I can skip over the explanation and just reply that yes, I've tried it.
This was the sort of situation where the owner came out and greeted us, and instead of taking our orders they brought out a fixed array of dishes, and it was all on the house, so I felt pressured to eat what they gave me so as not to appear rude. It's happened fairly often here in Italy that people invite me over for dinner or generously offer me food without thinking to ask whether I eat meat, since vegetarianism is a pretty foreign concept for most, and I feel too timid or embarrassed to refuse it. So, it kind of grosses me out, but I've ended up eating meat a few times here. Oh well, I'd hate to seem snotty or ungrateful. So anyway, milza can now be crossed off the list.
Another thing: the CG does alumni interviewing for Brown here in Italy, and he said he usually gets 4 or 5 applicants a year to interview, usually Italian kids with one American parent. I wonder if it's too late to sign up for this year; it'd be fun to interview kids for Brown, and it'd be interesting to see what sorts of Italian kids apply.
A year or two ago I never thought I'd become the sort of alum who'd be volunteering for alumni interviewing, or going back for Commencement, or donating to the Annual Fund, or attending dumb Ivy League alumni cocktail parties in San Francisco. Yet here I am. Graduating from college does weird things to you. Next thing you know, I'll be dressing my baby up in little Brown outfits -- or no, better yet, as Bruno the Bear for Halloween -- and turning out annually for the Harvard football game. Well, let's hope it doesn't quite come to that.
Then yesterday after CG time it was Italo's birthday so we went to dinner at this darling little place that serves typical Sicilian food and to which I will surely bring anyone and everyone who comes to visit me -- so remember it, it's called Cucina. Like Kitchen in Novato, the name is so vague that I fear I won't be able to remember. Plus he brought me some leftover wildberry mousse cake thing that his mother made for the occasion that was amazing, and by the end of the night I wanted to die of fullness, though it was all, with the exception of the milza, very delightful.
Plus Paola was kind enough to come pick up my laundry and return it all clean and freshly scented and neatly folded and newly lovely -- like my own personal laundry service. So as you can see I'm just a pig in mud over here.
Is that even an expression? It's so weird how your English leaves you when you're not around native speakers for a while. Well not basic English, obviously, but colloquial expressions. Like yesterday I was trying to think of the one about memory and elephants: elephants never forget? or is it singular: an elephant never forgets? or like in Italian, so-and-so has a memory like an elephant? or like my favorite Agatha Christie book, Elephants Can Remember? I've gotten myself all mixed up.
All right, there's more to say, much of it probably not particularly compelling but by now you've probably realized I write this more to keep my thoughts from boiling over and to keep track of where the hell my time goes, rather than as any sort of coherent or informative account for an outside reader, so I'll write my nonsense and my minutiae and my scatterbrained musings whether you like it or not. But for now I ought to go to bed or do something productive like review the Glorious Revolution for tomorrow morning. Remind me to tell you about Grazia and the Marcos and Grazia's Welsh friend. And I finally took some photos of Paola's place that I'll have to look through and post. Until soon, ragazzi.
Un abbraccio forte forte e un bacio enorme enorme.
Until tomorrow.
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