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Together with the ToKalon Association we published this signed letter written by a teacher the day before starting again in class with her students.
Dear school,
there is no need to go looking in the diaries of grandparents and great-grandparents, just ask our parents to tell us: once, not long ago, you were a great and respected institution and the teacher was one of the most respected and authoritative people . No one would ever dream of putting their mouth on what he said. I remember, for example, that thirty years ago my brother was in first grade and had a teacher appreciated by everyone in our provincial city. One day he came home with an Italian notebook in which he had done an assignment. My brother had written in his little thought (which today would be called text): “Yesterday I went to the cinema with my family to see The Aristocats.” The teacher had corrected the sentence as follows: “Yesterday I went to the cinema with my family to see The Aristocats.” My mother, dear School, is a person with two titles, my father writes books that nobody reads, but anyway, he writes. And neither of them dared to attack the teacher’s mistake, nobody said a word, nobody questioned the figure of their teacher in front of my brother, then six years old. They were very clear about how important it was not to endanger the teacher-student relationship than to point out an error, perhaps due to carelessness.
Dear School, once it was you who allowed the son of the engineer and the chief doctor and the son of the bricklayer and the garbage man to learn the same things, because neither the engineer, nor the chief doctor, nor the bricklayer, nor the garbage man felt in the right to say what he gave to his children. Thanks to you, School, children once had the same opportunities.
Then something happened. At a certain point, there began to be people who felt entitled to say that teachers are privileged: “Three months of vacation a year, Christmas and Easter at home, half a day at school, well, they don’t do anything.” Is this a cliché? Since I have been teaching, I hear this constantly. But it does not offend me, because I know how much and how I work, I know how long 4 or 5 hours of class a day, with 20-25 students (children in my case), the adrenaline rush, the level of attention required, and the ‘inability to disconnect even for a moment, not even while drinking coffee from the thermos that you have to bring from home, because you can’t say “now I’m taking a 10-minute break and I’m going to the bar.”
But obviously after a while you feel diminished, you start looking for a way to defend yourself. There must have been a moment, I ask you, dear School, perhaps you remember when it happened, a moment when you thought you had to start changing, to find a way to answer these inferences, which were getting heavy.
At a certain point, perhaps when access to knowledge became more immediate, when everyone, even cartoons, began to teach something, at some point the fact that you, the School, taught to read, write and pretend , but especially reasoning, they seemed trivial, obvious things that can be learned anywhere.
Perhaps you have begun to think about it yourself, dear College, perhaps you have been fooled by this common opinion, perhaps you have lost faith in yourself.
So how did you think to react? She thought, and I’m afraid the mistake is here, that she should have proven what she was doing, she thought she had to give a reason why she was there. But it is difficult to show the world that you teach them to think, to reason, especially a world that thrives on products, a world of commerce, a world of immediate gratification, of everything and immediately, the world of WIFI …
“He who sows dates does not reap dates”, the saying goes, and if there are those who sow dates, it is you, School.
But there was a time when it was claimed to see your appointments immediately, immediately the results of your work, and then, perhaps out of exhaustion, perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of disappointment, you decided to focus on genetically modified dates, dates that can be collected from righ now.
So, since those dates had to be seen, you began to add to your usual work activities that had visibility, those packaged products that could be easily advertised, concrete things, that the company could see and touch, and at a certain point it deceived you. alone, and you too began to believe that the more of these dates you produced, the greater their value.
At the same time, perhaps, this new way of teaching has given a breath of fresh air to their teachers, who for years had been doing the same, giving them the appearance of being able to introduce new stimuli and more interesting and rewarding activities into their work lives.
You began to live from projects, exhibitions, end-of-year parties, jobs and jobs, you were filled with experts and technologies, participated in tenders, revolutionized the time and the way of teaching, even to make the world understand that you also worked, to silence those who told you that you did nothing, and that “I am very good at teaching reading and writing” (as they say in Rome).
You bowed to those who told you that you no longer need to teach content, because everyone has a smartphone in hand and if you don’t know in which Italian region Ferrara is, ask the god Google, and if you don’t know the multiplication table of seven there is calculator, and if you don’t study the poems by heart it doesn’t matter, because you have agendas and reminders at your fingertips … and you started to focus on the so-called reality tasks, which had to teach your students to do something, and that they promised a final product. Without fighting to point out that the child, or the man, will know that he has learned to reason and use the knowledge you have given him only when he is outside of you, and when faced with a new problem, an unexpected situation, an unforeseen experience. traceable to your duties. You may also have forgotten that if you are not there to watch your students harvest your dates, and even if no one will ever thank you for planting them, it will be precisely these that will feed them throughout their future.
It seems to me, dear School, that little by little you have become an entertainment gym, also thanks to a new pedagogical line that has established that the child should never get bored, and that we only have to attend to their interests, it seems to me that the New Gospel of “If I listen I forget, if I see, I remember, if I do, I understand” has led to so much knowing how to do, but little to know and little to be.
From this point of view, dear school, my opinion (and unfortunately I know that I am not the only one who thinks so, although I honestly hope I am wrong) is that you are no longer as democratic as before, my opinion is that, while you entertain, the The son of the engineer and the chief physician will learn elsewhere what you no longer teach them, while those who do not have the opportunity to learn elsewhere will learn nothing.
Today you are in crisis, dear school. You are in crisis because the Coronavirus and everything that has happened is imposing on you a way of working that is not what you are used to lately: individual desks, students at a safe distance, rivers of disinfectant gel, no group work, masks that they cover smiles and yawns, without sharing. No expert can enter the classroom, no billboard can be hung on the walls, no reality work can be done, no project, no travel, nothing at all. But are you really sure there is nothing left? There are students, all different from each other but all with exactly the same right to learn, with the same curiosity, with the same desire to grow. There are teachers who are passionate about their work, convinced that “students are not vases to fill, but torches to light”.
Dear school, the educational relationship that lives within you is hope for the future. Tomorrow you will be overrun with excited and enthusiastic students, who can’t wait to start or get back to you after a six month absence.
Trust yourself, School, regain your authority, regain your royal role, think about what you are sowing!
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