the first day of school in middle school
twelve o’clock, September 16, 2021 – 09:41 am
The writer, who is also a professor, tells of the beginning of the lessons in the presence after the Covid stop. Returning from almost two years of middle school in Dad, I now observe them in their three-dimensionality
from Viola Ardone
Lor wait, organize it, schedule it in dozens of college meetings, imagine it for a long time and then, in the end, you always care. The first day of school an initiation rite that is renewed from year to year, but this time it was not comparable to anyone else: in finding myself in class with all my students I felt a joyful and unexpected emotion.
An unfiltered, real, physical reaction, irrepressible in seeing my old students – whom I had had the opportunity to meet in person for no more than ten days in all – and in meeting new ones, veterans of almost ten days. two years of middle school in Dad. And I did not try, in front of them, to mask the emotion, the shining eyes, the smile wider than the mask, the voice a little trembling. I thought there was nothing wrong with sharing that little, big, long-awaited and so often postponed happiness. That of being all together again in our place, of having gone through the storm and having come out of it, of having finally found ourselves on our “treasure island”.
I made the roll call and asked everyone to stand up to measure with their eyes how much they had grown from one year to the next, to see them shine in the three-dimensionality of their fifteen years, after having observed them like stickers in an album, flattened in the two computer screen sizes. We began the lesson by comparing ourselves on the books I had assigned to read for the summer, and their shouting, the overlapping of speeches, the intertwining of words wiped out the white noise of bad Internet connections and the forced silence of the mute function. to which we inevitably had to adapt in digital teaching. They are beautiful, my boys. This, I’m sure, every teacher will have thought on this first day of school. Beautiful in youth and beautiful in spirit.
Almost everyone proudly told me that they were vaccinated, someone completed the cycle and someone else waiting for the second dose. And they did it not for ideological reasons or because someone had forced them. They are vaccinated because they are driven by a strong sense of reality, because they are pragmatic and because they want to live. Or perhaps it is because at their age it is easier to deal with hope, a good that is more within reach than it is for us adults. And there was no room, on the first day, for the reasoning about the classrooms still too full, about the ventilation still entrusted only to the wide open windows, about the difficulties of new members in juggling the transitivity and intransitivity of verbs.
There is a lot to work, a lot to rebuild and a lot to change, in the school. This is our job. But the first day was the time of the party, because we waited so long and because we deserved it. There have been many words, on this first day, and also some silences, unspoken phrases, partly out of luck and partly because our projects were wrecked almost immediately last year. We didn’t tell each other when the last bell rang, but I’m sure we all thought it, in unison: This year will be different. This year we will stay.
September 16, 2021 | 09:41
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