“I’m here and I want to tell you how big the world is”. Because every year the Liberi Nantes Italian school begins again
It’s 7.35am. Usually, I have just boarded the underground. It’s rush hour, a time when a huge crowd of people moves from one part of Rome to another.
I often listen to the students’ conversations – who is late, who hasn’t done their homework, who’s in love, who is skipping the first class, who feels properly prepared for class activities, who has not done their research because of Netflix/Playstation/five-a-side, who has been in trouble too many times and would rather do just about anything else rather than go to school.
I smile every time, thinking about the first time I bunked school, even if the character of the teacher comes powerfully back and if I was a professor in compulsory education I would use the red pen and the class register to end up closed in the broom cupboard at the first opportunity, the victim of terrible vexations. The good news is that I am not a teacher in a compulsory education school.
The other news is that without school I wouldn’t have known how to be. That I believe strongly in education, but I believe even more in reciprocal teaching, in the sharing of knowledge, in knowledge as a collective good, that the intelligence of the individual only has a sense in relation to the abilities of the others. A bit like the story of how happines is only real if it shared.
Teaching Italian to foreign students, becoming a teacher of L2/Ls seemed to me like a good idea, one of those ideas which suddenly broadens your horizons. Because among the students of various languages and nationalities that I could have taught I chose that particular sector of migrant students that pass through our country for a few years, a few months, or that choose Italy as the final destination of a journey that started far away. As far away as the Horn of Africa, as far as Syria, as Kurdistan, or Venezuela.
Listening to them I feel so uncosmpoplitan, with my life so deeply rooted in Rome, while the Italian school students have crossed continents. I feel so un uncourageous, with my daily worries – shopping, work deadlines, the Roman traffic – while the students of the Italian school tell of their dark nights, of fleeing, of violence, or of losing everything, the disappearance of their family, of loneliness and of silence.
And it is not that they have a great wish to tell, because perhaps they have understood that there are no adequate words in our language to tell the the story of the suffering of others. Or maybe they are tired of having their story told by others. It is their story and they want to find the words to tell it. Some of them come to school for this reason too, to be able to say “I am here and I want to tell you how big the world is”.
Not all of them, but many want to speak a little Italian to find work and lead a dignified life. To get up every morning like many Romans at 7am, to get the underground at 7.30am and to meet other students and works who are beginning their day. To do, they want so much to do.
If I was a businesswoman I would have tried to see how we could work together. But instead I am a teacher. I build with words, not bricks. From these we begin to build new destinies, each one searching for the right words.
Martina Volpe
