Some jobs pay the rent, some don’t. Some make you want to wear your walking shoes, some make you want to hide under the bed alongside your slippers. I’m sure you know the type of employment I mean. It’s the kind that inspires self-pep talks at bus stops and induces you to remember the words to We shall overcome’. And when you call home to voice your professional pain, your mother says that she has faith in you’ and is sure everything will turn out fine’. So, you’re forced to buck up and build character.
My new gig at the Liceo Franchetti was one of those be-brave-in-this-world teaching jobs that make you want to run out of the classroom as soon as you realize that the students stand whenever a teacher crosses the threshold. And, as it’s taken me two decades to get over having been forced to be a teenager, I’ve always thought it best to avoid jobs that entail classrooms full of them.
However, this post was relatively well paying. I needed money and they were desperate for a mother-tongue professor to teach test strategy for the PET exam, a task I could most probably handle.
>You’ll have no problem at all,’ their real English teacher reassured me on my first day. These are the smart kids’.
By the smart kids’ I assumed she meant the serious front-row-sitters who brought supplies to school in their pencil cases and used white-out while taking notes.
I was wrong.
These teens had chosen to attend one of Italy’s classical high schools’ where they voluntarily suffer over Greek verb conjugations and memorize Latin verse, hoping that someday they might make a living from it. They could sooner quote A Midsummer’s Nights Dream’ than order a sandwich on a Saturday night at Piccadilly Circus. On most days, I think it’s a credit to the Italian school system that these students-whose most serious relationships have started and ended via text message-have recently read D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in their English class. The fact that they can barely express a coherent sentence in the language is actually a good thing-or a least I feel somewhat grateful for it. They day they achieve fluency, I won’t be able to stop myself from sitting down at one of their desks, begging them teach me.
Of course, besides the fact that they really are on a first name basis with Homer, these kids live in the twenty-first century. Their most prized possessions fit into an i-pod. They have little practice with apology and munch on excuses as if they were potato chips. They tune out on a dime and tune in for a dollar. A ray of light across the floor, the creak of a shutter, a falling eraser is ten times more worthy than whatever in the world you happen to be saying.
Nonetheless, I like them. There is something inherently charming in knowledge without experience. They think eeny-meeny-miney-moe is a test-taking strategy. They believe the teacher can’t tell when they’ve taken the first train to La-la Land. They’ve never fried an egg, poured laundry detergent into a washing machine or gone on a job interview. They’ve never given anyone flowers or taken a phone message that they’ve had to write down. But there is life in them. Un-channeled, paradoxical, adolescent life running through their veins. And there is something to be said for that.
Last Wednesday, equipped with a 1980s cassette player that no one outside the school system would lower themselves to use, we worked on listening skills. The kids listened in alarm to the voice of an Englishman who could have easily been Sherlock Holmes. And, admittedly, they would have had to have been private investigators themselves to understand which answers on their test sheet needed to be ticked as true responses.
Moved by an uncommon sense of pity, I told them that we would listen again and that they should take care to hear what he said after stopping to breathe. People always say important things after a breath, and Sherlock was certainly no different.
I watched them nod slightly in unison-an eerie coincidence for Italian students. And I noticed that Nicoll, an unusually bright and usually on-task student, was staring out the window, hoping that a pigeon would fly by and bring some excitement.
>Nicoll’, I told him, there are two good reasons you should give me all of your attention. The first is that I’m a woman. The second is that I’m a teacher. If you were 40, you’d have the right to ignore me-but you wouldn’t really want to.’
The statement brought him back to the Land of Simulated Dialogue and interested him enough to bring him out of his slouch. So I continued, Smart men never ignore women or teachers’.
>Especially smart men who can read the Latin inscriptions on tomb stones’, he replied with such promptness of wit that it took me a moment to smile.
When I did, his entire face broke into a wide grin the likes of which is a privilege to see on the mouth of a 15-year-old. I say broke’ because his smile edged off the corners of his cheeks and for an instant I got a glance of the man he would one day be. Of course, the split second of future I saw in his face was gone by the time we finished our laugh. As soon as it was over, the boy was back and already bored again. Still, for an instant the I-get-it glimmer’ had seized the space behind his eyes and something that looked like understanding had flashed through his features. It was my fatto bello della settimana.
Of course, Nicoll has years of forgetfulness to live through. Twenty-five years from now he may suddenly remember the exchange. I hope so, because if he does, it will be another fatto bello. As for me, I will never be able to walk across the tombstones in the floor of a gothic church, without cursing the fact that I can’t read Latin and wishing good things to the used-to-be-boy who could.
