Teaching bambini

I am so mentally exhausted it’s funny. It’s even hard for me to write in English at this point because I’ve been thinking so hard all day. But I’m kind of getting used to it. For example, last night Marilena realized that she could use me to send her aunt in Minnesota (who doesn’t speak Italian) an email in English. I was so proud of myself when she told me what she wanted to say in Italian and I translated it.

Alright I’ll quickly go over the last day or two and then some more details about my family. Yesterday our group met up around 10 and went together to two different schools in Rogliano. While walking down a hill to the first one, there were kids yelling and cheering for us out the windows, saying random stuff they knew in English. We all felt famous, it was pretty cool. I snapped a few pictures. Also, the view from that hill was incredible! I wouldn’t mind going to school there just to see that vista every day.

We met the school administrators, then popped our heads into all of the 1st and 2nd grade classes to say hi. The kids mostly just stared at us. Then we all went home for lunch. I again had dinner for lunch, as they do it here. A full course of pasta first, then some sort of meat, salad, bread, sometimes pickled olives and such. My host mom is a pretty good cook, and her parents have a huge garden and make a ton of stuff for her. Even homemade olive oil! And they’ve been sure to let me try their homemade grappa, both apple and strawberry flavors. God that stuff is strong, I can barely handle it! Then they laugh at the faces I make while it goes down.

We all learned very, very quickly that you must never let your host mom know you’re hungry. Cardinal rule here. Otherwise it’s “mangia, mangia!” until you can’t take another bite. Today in class Ruggero asked us what phrases we wanted to learn, and everything we came up with was some derivation of “I’m full.” The other day when I came home I made the mistake of eating a cookie I had bought on the way to Rogliano, and when Marilena saw me she started asking “Ho fame? Ho fame!” (Are you hungry?) I told her no, solo una mirenda (snack) because I really just wanted a cookie, but she was about to run off and make me a full meal. Then today she went to the store in the morning and bought us all fresh focaccia bread to have as a snack later, and mamma mia it was so good!

And believe me, today I was glad I had that snack. My morning consisted of trying to teach 2 classes of 1st graders (all 6-7 years old) a little bit of English. It was a group of 5/6 of us, and we walked in there with some idea of what we wanted to do, but by no means were we prepared. After trying rather unsuccessfully to teach “what’s your name?” and “my name is…” to these kids, we stared to sing the alphabet and numbers. We then moved on to having them write down the months of the year in Italian and English. The writing slowed them down for a while, so that used up all the rest of our time in each class. They loved it when we taught them how to day damme cinque in English (high five). Then I gave up and just started walking around talking to these kids, asking names etc. I think the most stressful part was just standing up in front of a class of 20 with no idea of what to do next. That and trying to understand what the teacher was saying to us in Italian. I’m not good at this stuff, growing up I didn’t babysit for a reason.

We went to one elementary school in the morning for an hour and a half, then bussed to another elem. school for another hour or so. In the second class I saw a little girl, a really shy, quite one, that looked exactly (exactly!) like my mother. Or at least like my mother did at that age based on pictures I’ve seen. I could not take my eyes off her, I’m sure she must have been thinking ‘why’s this crazy American chick staring at me?’ But seriously, it was astounding. The creepiest part of it all was that her name was Francesca, the Italian version of my mother’s name. My goal now is to at one point get a picture of/with this girl to bring home and show my family.