IL FATTO BELLO
Cats who copy
Dusty chalk is free for all who can stand to use it, but safe electrical plugs and screws tight enough to keep the chairs from losing their seats are not entirely guaranteed. Nonetheless, the principal of the commerce-inspired high school where I've just been hired hopes my regionally funded salary will arrive by the autumn of 2010. Would I be willing to start next week and just wait and see?
Why, certainly. The world pleas ‘economic crisis.' Emergency hires are order of the day. High school jobs build character. I hold these truths to be self-evident.
In case you've never been through it on either side of the classroom, Italy's school system supports practical trade institutes and theory-based schools offering university prep classes on subjects that cannot be tied to anything real. During their last year of middle school, the country's nervous neo-adolescents make a daunting decision that's premature by about two decades: what I want to be when I grow up. From the age of 14, education is specialized rather than general; thus, well-meaning parents cajole, convince and insist for months, pressuring their children to go down a somewhat random road that, they hope, will whet their inborn skills one day.
In Italy, the obligation to educate one's offspring according to their natural abilities is part of the Italian Constitution and recited, by law, as part of one's marriage vows. Thus, mechanically minded kids with useful hands and an allergy to anything bound in a book are ushered into vocational schools. Teens who can make it through a math test without three trips to the toilet enroll in ‘scientific' high schools and those who learned something beyond the names for the primary colors in their English courses register for ‘linguistic' institutes, where they learn to send letters in multiple languages.
I have been waiting for months for the new school year to begin this job because, for me, Italian students of this age group are entertainment incarnate. They touch each other during class as if you were a drive-in movie not a lecturer and then act shy about every form of communication that does not look like a text message. Contradiction flows through their veins rather than blood, and I watch them in wonder. On ordinary days, they are smart and bored, quick and slow, guileless and astute, with new bodies and old eyes-both innocent and cynical. On testing days, the kids wake up and offer academy award-winning spectacles: conspicuous copycats cheat as shamelessly as tabbies intent on scratching the sofa where you're sitting. It's not even a question of catching them at it. Cats inclined to sharpen their nails on your new corduroy cushions are completely self-righteous about the validity of their impulses. Italian students are similar: they simply square their feline shoulders and make a break for it. When girls are caught with cheat-sheets taped to the reverse side of their hemlines or boys are heard blatantly begging for the word that fills in the blank, they'll unfailingly defend themselves with something wise and wonderful like ‘Professor, no one else has ever had the courage to ask me to lift my skirt before' or ‘Everyone is cheating. You don't really expect me to be the only one stupid enough to keep my eyes on my own paper, do you?'
Unfortunately for me, I am much more interested in responses like these than I ever am in the correct third person form of the present conditional. They, on the other hand, are enthralled at how truly easy it is to shock the English teacher. Are all American people such prudes when it comes to breaking the rules, they wonder. ‘Italians like shared effort; English speakers prefer the competitive edge,' I tell them.
They don't believe my explanation, nor do they really understand it. To assert that American students hide their answers and take their tests hidden behind a barricade of books is the same as saying that rusty nails dropped into Coca-Cola come out clean after one night's soak. To them, copying is cooperative learning. Accounts about foreign honest-Abe teens cannot possibly be true. But then, their language also does not have idiomatic expressions that allude to ex-presidents as ‘honest', which may, in fact, explain their copying in the first place.
‘If you are so good over there, why are we the ones with all the saints?' a student asked me one time.
It always serves as a good reminder, especially now that a new school year is dawning. Eighteen-year-olds who can conjure up questions like that under pressure have no need to memorize irregular verbs-or anything else that's about breaking the rules.
Teacher by profession and writer by necessity, Linda Falcone is celebrating her fifteenth year of Italian living. Author of Italians Dance and I'm a Wallflower and If They Are Roses, she delights in experimenting with both poetry and prose. Only the grocery list should never be written.
Features
Articles
Special Issues
