first day of school!

Word of Caution: It's A Long One...

So I just got back from my second day of school, or rather, my second first day. I’m teaching at two schools, one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and the other on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I hope... but I might have to work Saturdays as well). It’s such a relief to have gotten those two first days out of the way. I was much more nervous beforehand than I was by the time I actually got inside the classroom. By then, it was like, oh yeah, high schoolers. I know these guys. They’re not so scary.

Both first days were pretty nervewracking, though, since I was meeting all of the teachers for the first time, like literally when they shoved me into the classroom, so I hadn’t been able to talk any of them about what they wanted from me or what I was supposed to do on the first day. At Galilei today, I didn’t even get a written schedule until the end of the day; each teacher would just lead me to the next one and we’d dive right in again.

At CEI I was pretty terrified, having never even been inside an Italian school before, so it was probably better that I only had to introduce myself and then spend the rest of the time observing. I’d prepared a lesson anyway – a simple exercise of having the students write down some information about themselves and some questions for me, and then go around sharing what they’d written. It was a good thing I’d done it though, since at Galilei I was expected to just walk in and give my lesson. But at both schools I had no clue what the teachers wanted me to do until we were both standing at the front of the classroom and they were explaining it to the students.

A little anxiety-provoking. I’m not a spontaneous person. I don’t really do improvisation.

The work itself is going to be a bit challenging, I think, more so than I was expecting. Given that I’m doing completely different things at each school and to a lesser extent, in each class, it’s like instead of having one regular job, I have 12 little jobs. Twelve. That’s how many different classes I’m slotted to teach (though it may change, and I’m hoping it will). Multiplied by 20 or so students per class, that’s 240 kids to get to know. Not ideal.

So, about my schools. According to various sources, they’re two of the best schools in Palermo. This year, the schools had to contribute financially to the ETA program, which means that basically only the wealthiest schools can participate. Which in a way is too bad, since their need is smaller than that of less wealthy schools, but I probably shouldn’t complain. One of them, CEI, is a private Jesuit-run school, which runs K-12. My tutor, Josephine, says it’s the best school in Palermo. Italo says it’s the school where the wealthiest families of Palermo send their kids. Same difference, right? Maybe, we’ll see.

The school itself is beautiful. Palermo is full of places like this, apparently, where you turn off of a busy street and come unexpectedly into an oasis of green, peaceful and calm and tucked away from the busy world outside. You can tell it’s quite a wealthy school, with perfectly manicured lawns and well-restored buildings.

So the education system in Italy is quite different, but suffice it to say that high school is 5 years long instead of 4, and slightly specialized. CEI contains a few different types of high school (at liceo classico there’s an emphasis on classics/humanities, at liceo scientifico they emphasize math and science..), but I’m teaching at the liceo europeo, where they focus on modern european languages. So far, though, it doesn’t seem as though the actual curriculum varies too much from one type of liceo to the next. But I may be wrong about that.

I’m assigned to all the 4th and 5th year students, of which there are two groups each. So 4 groups overall, and I’ll see them each twice a week. The catch is that I’m teaching European history, not English or American culture, which is what we’re supposed to do. I like history, obviously, but this is high school history. Meaning that you cover way too much ground to go into any meaningful depth about anything, you basically just cover the wars (and wars to me are the most boring part of history), and the main focus, at least in the 5th year, is preparing for the end-of-year exams that determine whether or not you graduate high school. And, in the classes that I observed, the main activity was having the students read a paragraph aloud and then explain it. Which meant picking out a couple of phrases and repeating them to the teacher, likely without really understanding them, since oh yeah, this history is in English, which means it’s even more boring and easier to tune out than a history class in their native language would be.

So, since the main things we’re supposed to do are help the kids practice conversation in English and talk about American culture, I’m still not quite sure how I’ll fit into these European history classes. One of them goes from the 1400s to the French revolution, and America wasn’t even around until the very end, so there’s no way to squeeze America in there. I don’t know.

The thing is that both of the school’s English teachers are native speakers (or rather, “native speakers,” since both of them kind of speak an Italianized version of English, though they were born and spent their early childhoods in the U.S.). Thus my presence would be superfluous in their classes, so I get history. The bizarre part is that the history textbook is in Italian, but the class is conducted in English, and I’m supposed to be pretend not to speak any Italian so the kids will force themselves to speak English with me. I don’t know how the kids are expected to believe that I know no Italian when the entire course is structured around an Italian text, but whatever, maybe they won’t think too much about it.

The other thing about pretending not to speak any Italian is that then, as I saw on my first day, it becomes a fantastically fun game for them to say obscene or funny things either to get me to betray that I understand, or to be able to laugh at the fact that I seemingly don’t know what they’re saying.

Anyway, on the plus side, I was worried that teaching the oldest students would be strange because I would seem too close to their age to be taken seriously. 22 is an absurdly young age for a teacher in Italy, since people often take until 25 to graduate from college and longer to become a teacher. I was surprised, though, at how young even the 5th-year students seemed. Possibly I seemed young to them, too, but I was relieved; in my opinion, given the way I look and the way I dress and the way I carry myself, I’m pretty easily distinguishable from them.

Also, a funny thing: both days, even though the teachers in most cases hadn’t previously mentioned anything about my arrival, it only took until 2nd period for everyone in school to know who I was. And I’d hear everyone whispering in the halls around me, “There’s that girl from San Francisco,” or, “There’s the American.”

My second school, then, is called Galileo Galilei, a liceo scientifico. It’s supposedly one of the best, if not the best, public school in Palermo, although I don’t know exactly how that works, as I’m not sure how they determine who goes to which school. We’ll find out. Anyway, Galilei is massive compared to CEI... about 2000 students. To give you an idea: at CEI, the liceo europeo has 2 groups in every year, A and B (so I teach 4A and 4B, and 5A and 5B). At Galilei it goes up to least 9, since one of my classes is 3I. Also, at Galilei, I’m supposed to come in two days a week but I have 4 different classes each day, or 8 different classes overall, which means I’d only be seeing each group once a week.

Plus, perhaps more importantly, that’s 8 different teachers to deal with. 8 teachers to satisfy, 8 different sets of expectations to worry about, 8 different teaching styles to work around.

At Galilei, it being a math and science school and society being the way it is, about two thirds of the students are boys to one third girls. At first I thought, uh oh, they’re going to be trouble. But then it turned out that the kids at Galilei were much quieter and more well-behaved, plus seemingly more motivated and attentive, than the kids at CEI. Maybe it’s that CEI sense of entitlement. That’s what Josephine would say.

Anyway, the CEI kids, in comparison, sort of seem to do what they like in class. They talk back, argue with the teacher about her instructions, spend half the lesson turned around in the seats chatting with the person behind them, get up and leave the room or just walk around it whenever they feel like it.

They emphasized at the orientation that standards of behavior in Italian classrooms aren’t the same as in American classrooms. Basically, the room is never completely quiet, and there’s usually a certain level of activity in the room, and students tend to bicker with the teacher or dispute what she says. I guess I had super-low expectations after what they said at orientation; I got the impression that classrooms were always slightly chaotic. Compared to what I expected, though, it wasn’t too bad.

And actually, I was impressed by their English abilities. And then all the teachers are always apologizing for the students’ poor language skills, even in front of them, which can’t do much for their self esteem. And of course they’re always reprimanding students for their mistakes. One of the teachers was even chastising her students, who weren’t making any mistakes, for not using more complex grammatical constructions or advanced-enough vocabulary when they spoke in class. And then she complains aloud that people don’t speak out enough. Boh.

Also, I found out that I have to teach American literature to the Galilei, and I’m supposed to select authors for them to read. I had a couple of ideas, but my tutor Francesca wanted me to think of a female writer, preferably from the 1950s-1970s and preferably someone who writes about Vietnam, protests, and civil rights, as apparently that’s what the kids are most interested in. So if you can think of someone who meets these qualifications, let me know.

All right, now I have to go review my Napoleon and my English Civil War history for tomorrow. Oh, did I tell you that the rowdy, boisterous ones I met on Monday at CEI were supposedly the good classes? The more advanced, better-behaved ones. So now I get to find out what the bad classes are like. Wish me luck! More soon.