this week in my life

This week I've given lessons on the American school system, American geography, Napoleonic Empire, Milton's Paradise Lost, Obama and JFK, and the English Revolution.

I'm expecting that any minute someone will come up to me and be like, "Oh hey you're american, can you talk to my class about American advancements in nuclear physics over the past 100 years? K thanks!" Oh sure, and while we’re at it why don't we talk about the genealogies of everyone’s horses as well? (Bonus points: guess the movie reference!)

And I thought this year was going to be laid-back. Before I got here I was making lists of all the things I could do with the loads of free time I was sure iId have.

Anyway, if this post seems a little scrambled, it’s because I’ve been pretty scrambled these days. Before i go on, there are a couple of things you absolutely must know in order to get a sense of what my life is like (and since my life right now is work, I mean what my work is like).

Josephine, my tutor at CEI (in Fulbright language, tutor means the person who’s responsible for taking care of me at each school -- supervisor, really) has the exact same accent as Mira Sorvino’s character in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite. She grew up in the U.S. until age 12, when her parents decided to move back to Sicily, and now she teaches English. Her accent in English is totally New Yorker, but she uses these bizarre words and expressions that come from translating directly from Italian. It’s, pardon the expression, a total mindfuck. Like today she was saying, “Can you believe the rain? I’m soak wet!” It’s funny, and it’s weird to be the only person who realizes that her English is nuts.

She’s great, though, very intense and very anxious and very concerned about my well-being. Every time she sees me in the halls she goes “Are you okay? Is everything okay?” with an expression of such concern that you’d think she just told me one of my relatives had died. Anyway, she’s a real character. Some important things about Italian classrooms that I neglected to mention before:

In Italy, kids stay with the same group of 20-25 students for every class, every year. Each group has their own classroom, rather than each teacher, and so the teachers rotate rooms each period, rather than the students. The classroom thing might seem small but it changes the entire dynamic of school for them. The classroom belongs to them, and you, as the teacher, are a temporary visitor in their space. They’re much more in control of the classroom environment than the teacher is, which seems potentially interesting but makes things incredibly difficult for teachers. They sit wherever they like, with whomever they like, at 2-person tables, and apparently you’re not allowed to re-arrange them. It’s incredibly frustrating. In my worst class, CEI’s 4B, I feel like the discipline issues would be cut in half at least if we could just move them around. It’s such a basic thing. When I was in high school, not even our most lax teachers let us choose where to sit. We almost always sat in alphabetical order, or in some arrangement according to the teacher’s whim. It doesn’t make sense to me to let the troublemakers always sit together and the weakest students fade into the back of the room where they inevitably miss some of the exchange between teacher and eager beavers who sit up front and answer all the questions.

The discipline issue is frustrating, also because I’m not supposed to concern myself with maintaining order in the classroom, as it’s supposed to be the regular teacher’s job. In most classes it’s not a problem: I don’t expect absolute silence, and I don’t get it, but I can make myself heard and transmit information to the ones who want it. They told us again and again at orientation that we shouldn’t take it personally that there’ll always be some degree of noise and activity in the classroom, as standards of discipline are different here. Okay, fine.

4B is the only group I have where it’s a major obstacle to getting anything done in class, and it’s awkward because their regular teacher, Barbara, is so clearly unable to enforce any kind of order, it’s like watching a fish flail around on a dock. I had them today, and it was exhausting. At any given time at least one third of them are talking. Two of the kids are reading a magazine in the back of the room, and one of them rips out some pages with Miss Italia on them, and gets up to come pin them up on the wall in the front of the classroom. This is while the teacher is lecturing, mind you. The girls are sitting in each other’s laps, the boys are throwing little objects around, there’s a couple in the front who are always canoodling. Someone gets up to walk across the room and give something to his friend, everyone’s turned around in their seats to say something to the person behind him.

I can’t just stand there while Barbara yells herself hoarse for them to be quiet, but I don’t know what to do other than my American methods which seem to be unacceptable. Move them around, split them up, make the worst ones come sit next to the teacher’s desk by themselves like first-graders on time-out. I don’t know. If it doesn’t change, they’re going to move me to a third-year class and I’ll have yet another subject matter to keep track of on top of everything else.

The irritating part, too, is that I had them on Wednesday with Josephine, as she asked me to come in and give a lesson during her English class, and they were great. I talked about American high school, and they were engaged and attentive and asked questions and made an effort to tell me in English about their school. Part of it is that Josephine has a much more authoritative presence and clearly commands their respect, and part of it was that the subject matter was actually interesting to them. History’s really brutal in there. Barbara’s never satisfied that they’ve truly understood the Thirty Years’ War, so every single lesson we have to go over it again. By this point even I hear the words ‘Defenestration of Prague’ and I’m totally checked out.

Today we managed to make a little bit of progress only when we came to the agreement that if they could answer my question, they could ask me a question of their own about whatever they liked. What dynasty was Elizabeth I a part of? After a few minutes, we manage to get “the Tudors.” Okay, go ahead. “Do you like Sicilian food?”

Why do they always ask that? As if I’m going to say no, even if I did dislike it?

Other than that, things are okay, if a little crazy.

There’s a really sweet young teacher at CEI, Roberta, who’s an English teacher at the Liceo Classico (the classical high school, where they focus on Latin and Greek). She treats me like a mini-celebrity, and every time she sees me she’s super excited about being able to practice English, and talk to me about how she wants to apply for the Fulbright to teach English in the U.S., and so on. She speaks wonderful English, with a British accent, and you can tell she’s the kind of person who’s never satisfied with her level and who’s always trying to perfect her language, tweak her accent, learn new words. In short, the way all language teachers, and English teachers in particular, should be; in English even more so than in other languages, you can never be finished because you will never stop encountering new words. Even native speakers never stop encountering new words. That's one of the things I love about English.

Anyway, today we were chatting in the hall and I said it was my free period and she asked if I’d sit in on her English class. My kids would love to meet you, she says, and it would be so fun for them to hear you speak in contrast to the way I speak. Well, I can think of some other ways I wouldn’t mind spending my free period, but she’s so nice, and she’s young and maybe we could actually be real friends. So okay, sure, I’ll come.

“You will? Oh, really? Oh, fantastic!” In her cute little British-Italian accent. And, as we’re coming to the door. “So we’re just starting to read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Would you mind giving us an introduction?”

Uh.

Paradise Lost. Well. I read the thing once, I can tell you that. I even remember liking it, once I got past the density of the language. Paradise Lost....uh... it was written in the 1600s? ... By a Puritan?... As I remember, the devil's kind of a big deal? That’s about all I remember.

This is basically my introduction: “So kids, what can you tell me about Paradise Lost?”

Thankfully, it works and they start talking about iambic pentameter and blank verse and Satan (which they pronounce “satin,” which is pretty distractingly amusing, but even the teachers say it, so I feel too embarrassed to correct them). And when they start talking about it, actually, I start remembering.

Roberta’s class is, unexpectedly, actually able to explain passages from this book that’s very difficult even for native speakers. “What did you think of them?” she asks me afterwards. “They’re amazing,” I say. “They’re my worst class!” she says cheerfully. “See, liceo classico is different.” Well gee, apparently.

Further proof that Liceo Classico students are piu’ bravi: they ask me where I went to college and when I say Brown they all go, “Ahhhhhhhhh!”

?? How do they know Brown? “Gossip Girl!” Oh, have you seen the OC? They talk about it on that show, too. “Oohhh, yes!” Nice. My high school classmates hadn’t heard of Brown, but these Italian high schoolers are duly impressed. Thanks, TV and movies. This week they also helped me explain lacrosse ("you know, like in American Pie?") and Phoenix ("You know, where Bella's from, in the beginning of Twilight") and autoshop ("In Grease, the class where Danny Zuko and the guys are always hanging out and working on cars.") Essential.

Also, Roberta took me to lunch after school and introduced me to her boyfriend whom she purposely hasn’t mentioned yet to any of the other teachers or to her students (who are always begging for information about teachers’ personal lives). His name Roberto. It's too cute... I always wondered whether male and female versions of the same name pair up, since there’s so much overlap here [and relatively few commonly-used names]: Federico/a, Francesco/a, Giulio/a, Giovanni/a, etc.). Apparently they do. And they both call each other “Robi.”

***

I hope I at least get out of this that I’ll start to feel more comfortable about being put on the spot. It happens so often here that even in these past two weeks I’ve felt myself become a lot more at ease standing up in front of the class and talking about something I know nothing about off the top of my head. As of now it’s only been teenagers, though. I hope this sense of comfort transfers to adults as well.

Yesterday at Galilei, too, it happened. The teacher and I had talked about doing a U.S. geography lesson sometime. I came in and told her that I hadn’t been able to get a map of America yet but I’d be getting one soon so for now could I do the lesson I’d planned about the American school system and next time we’d do geography?

No, she'd rather the class do geography now.

All right everyone, let’s learn about U.S. geography from the very dubious-looking map that I will draw on the board! Who needs actual maps to learn geography?

Can you show us where Cleveland is? someone asks.

Cleveland! I’m so glad you asked! Why, gee, Cleveland is right about here! I draw a dot somewhere vaguely in the middle of my rendering of the eastern Midwest. I have no idea where Cleveland actually is within Ohio. I've never even been to the Midwest. What are the chances someone will actually look up Cleveland and find out how accurate I am? One bonus about teaching: they can’t usually tell when you’re bullshitting.

My American school system lesson, which I gave to most of my other classes (only eight or nine times), went pretty well. In addition to general differences between the U.S. and American school systems, I talked about the electives and sports teams and activities at Novato High. They were all particularly shocked by the existence of the GSA, the Gay-Straight Alliance. Some were shocked-horrified (“But those are bad people!”), most were shocked-impressed (“Oh, we should have that at Galilei..”). Most of them were convinced that Italy will never be ready to accept such a thing.

That’s the sort of moment when I like telling them about the U.S. Even for the ones who are scandalized, I think it’s important to be able to say, See, there are different ways of doing things from the way you do things here. There’s a lot out there, outside of this place. Usually Americans get in trouble for not knowing much about how the rest of the world lives, but I've discovered we're not the only ones guilty of this.

Mostly by the end they’d say things like, “Prof, we’ve all decided we want to go to high school in America!” Whoa kids, don’t get too excited, it’s not all great. Well, it seems I’m serving my role as a propagandist, though. Also, I may have hated high school at the time, but as of now, after spending a couple of weeks in Italian high school, I'm feeling more and more confident about putting my hypothetical future children through the American school system. It might sound silly, because I obviously can't be completely objective. But football players, cheerleaders, lockers, the G.S.A., prom –- my kids are getting all of it, and if they want to wear all black, pierce odd body parts, and smoke cigarettes behind the gym, at least they’ll have had all those other possibilities open to them, you know?