When Things get Tough the Tough eat Chocolate

§ Confessions of a chocolate-chomping teacher 

I never believed chocolate gives you pimples. 2015 is my year to prove it

Last September they sent me to teach in a mountain village: 54 km from home.

Since then, I've been commuting 4 times a week, sometimes 5.

The alarm clock at 5 am, insomnia, mountain roads with bends and curves, loud students, fatigue, temperature, hundreds of bucks on gasoline, fools overtaking you in tunnels or on a snowy bend, trucks slagging uphill at 30 km/h + rain, fog, cold, snow...

No.

No way.

No way I could have made it without chocolate and be here to tell the tale.

110 km driving per day
=
440 km driving per week
=
1,760 km driving per month
=15,840 kilometers by car in a school year 

 

Read the whole post here 

 

 

 

§ False steps

Drops of ripe currant stained my white boots, yesterday in the garden.
It's a July afternoon. The speaker in the classroom is telling us how to write a good story, but I look in front of me – at feet and body parts.
I've been studying them for months, in weekly meetings with suspended words, chats on books and songs, jokes about the news, anger, memories, and other wonders.
I always write down everything on my notebook. Sometimes I also draw: a profile or the traits of a mouth. A fixed expression and a surprised one.

But today I look at the shoes.

Apart from the drops of ripe currant, my boots are white. Summer Indian boots with a round of studs. Once polished, they're beautiful again. The other shoes in the circle of chairs before me on large, long feet are sandals and sneakers.

I stare at the thighs in front of me: long muscles wrapped in a pigeon-coloured denim; at the end of big, hairy, honey-blond, almost thick ankles, there are matching shoes. Suede loafers, expensive and light on the feet. Clean. Almost new: the crêpe rubber is little worn, the upper looks uncut and moss-coloured stitching perfectly mark the edge.
Fashionable dainty loafers of beige light leather, untreated, for great comfort and healthy feet.

They're not as dirty as my boots. They have no stains of grass, or fruit, or mud.

Indeed, they're always very clean; but I seem to notice only on a summer day of rain. They will never get dirty, you see.

They can not get filthy, torn or worn. No gravel or sun, no sand or grass. No dirt or debris from the newly paved roads of summer construction sites at every crossroad. They don't walk or stop at the lights.

No puddles to avoid for these smooth shoes of untreated leather.
Sure, walk they do: many steps are taken in the delicate shades of moss with the untouched upper and the clean seams: dry and dusty hallways is what they cross.
Every day, they pass gates, run through corridors, and return, the suede loafers, so dainty, so soft and so neat; they cross a room and reach a window, they slow down at a sink, stop in front of a bed.

Get in the shower in the morning, to the library now and again.

Stand in the chapel and attend Mass on Sunday; once a week, they go see Mum.

And when I leave, on Fridays, the neat, soft and so dainty lightweight loafers walk back into a cell.

For these lightweight loafers that are so soft and dainty and neat, they dress the feet of a killer, you see.

 

From: 2 or 3 Things I know about Killers 

§ The Shoes

§ The KET is on the table

Learned gibberish about the European Common Framework of Reference for Languages 
For years I've been listening to students of all ages babbling in English.
I listen to them racking their brains about their motivations to study the language - from a frank «I do not give a s***, but I have to do it», to an urge to boost the international trade of sparkling wine, to a desire for vacations in the company of some exotic loafer.
From intellectual exoticism to a desire to escape – sexual boredom or taxes - reigniting, supporting and revitalizing this passion is part of my job.

But now that the school year has ended and I can freely indulge on the keyboard, both the alienation and final hilarity that accompanied my commuting from institutional halls to bored classrooms come to mind.

The scholarly meetings were crowded with teachers convinced of the beauty and essential need to teach English, and - of course- of the ensueing catastrophic disaster that would pluck those who do not learn it.

The students rebelled as I forced them to drop their mobiles.

«I am do, have you speak (...), they am be» were their dully crippled conjugations, until one eventually surrendered: «If I study more, I die»^©  
Still, some colleagues claim that

«if our Italian students are unable to communicate in English, they must be considered illiterate European citizens.»

 

Really?

Enter Alex de Large, and, Please, esc the bus^©. Or - “Scend the bus”^©, in alternative; either way, please follow me to our graduation exam session.

«There was me, that is Annalisa, and my three droogs, that is C., M., and E., and we sat in the professional school-leaving exam trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the mornings...»
What about the Italian teachers (of different subjects) - i.e. supposedly very literate European citizens - who were all too intimidated to venture technical questions in English to our graduating students, and only did so in a fantasy English that was even more delusional than the students' «*not pericolous compits^© *» of their professional training?

Majestically ungrammatical, beautifully incomplete sentences were left hanging in ellipses of humid breath in the first sweltering days of summer.

I have collected as many as 3 notebooks of wonderful creations in Newspeak or "Fantasy English." Were I the author of these gems, I would have already changed job.
Please note, all my students' creations come with their copyright symbol here©.  
Give daredevil Thomas his due.

A planetary business: But who stands to gain?

Take an international language, spread it over thousands of schools, divide it by hundreds of motivated teachers, add slogging professionals & students, mix in several beautiful courses and glaze with a drop of compulsory EU language certificates.

 Is it tasty enough?

 

 I have met English teachers living in Italy who repeatedly fail to pass their obligatory exam of Italian.
College students who have sat their compulsory B1 exam of English twelve times or more. (This means they had to pay several hundred bucks for the examination, had their thesis almost ready but missed a couple of rounds of graduation sessions and had the extra university fees to pay, on top of it all).
I have heard Italian tourism boards executives with a monthly net salary of € 2,500 unable to articulate a sentence in German or English, but also to book a flight and a hotel online.

I have heard a Maître d' explain the menu to Danish tourists by touching his breast and thigh. No chicken, if you know what I mean.
I even saw a stewardess throw away her survival kit, sink into the couch and tell everyone on the plane to fuck off. In 7 languages. 

 Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye

I ain't lying.
With these green eyes of mine, I've seen them do it, man.

As D'Orazio – another student of mine - put it,

«The verb to be is challenging. ^©» 
 Can you imagine being a teacher?!

Luckily enough, I eventually found my peace in Luca's candour. 
A 1^st grade student, Luca once blurted out:

«But, Missus, what am I supposed to do with all this English, if I barely go to Segonzano?», (it being a tiny mountain village about 7 km from his home, here in Trentino).
 

The good thing is that sometimes, in the classroom, a song by Bob Marley
is worth more than many a manual of grammar. 

I miss you loads, wonderful students of mine, I do!

So here's to you, European citizens & friends:

«I stood wondering if I was the idiot, taking life as a game, or whether it was him, that took it like a sentence to hard labour»

(freely translated quote from the Italian legendary film «Amici Miei»)

«There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening». 









 
• (my compit was not pericolous = il mio compito non era pericoloso = my work environment was safe / not dangerous / there was no hazard)
  
  
  

* KET: Key Inglese Test