A secondary school teacher in a town in Lombardy, Italy

Teaching English as a Foreign Language for 7 years 

May 2020 

Life before Covid-19 

Life was so good before Covid. It was busy: I live an hour away from the school where I teach, so my days were long. Plus I had my social life. Work was good: you’re not aware of the work you’re doing face-to-face until it gets taken away from you, because most of a teacher’s work is social. Teachers are firstly educators, after all. It was working well, also content-wise: face-to-face, you can teach better, you can do your job better. You can see the students, see their reactions. The mission I’ve always given myself as a teacher is to educate students to be better people, through English, in my case. That was my main concern, obviously together with conveying content. They followed me, they were happy to come to school, most of them were anyway, because they wanted to learn how to be in this world, not just learn English. Common problems used to be your typical things, you know, my mark is too low, the vending machine is empty, and so on…

Non ti accorgi del lavoro che fai in presenza finché non ti viene tolto. You’re not aware of the work you’re doing face-to-face until it gets taken away from you

 In terms of my teacher colleagues, their presence was crucial for me. I was talking to a colleague on Twitter recently and told him how I once spent half an hour listening to a co-worker talk about black holes. I’d have listened to her for hours! School really was a place for me to learn. 

How life has changed because of Covid-19 

It’s so different from what we’re doing now. My philosophy is to take the good out of bad situations. It was difficult to find the good in this situation [chuckles]. Now I no longer wake up at 5.50 in the morning to get to school. The number of classes has decreased, so they have fewer hours. The way we do our classes has changed completely: you can’t see their faces, they have their cameras off because their self-esteem is low, they hate showing their faces to their classmates when they’re not in a “perfect” situation. So you can’t see them and you have to pay so much attention to their voice tones. I’ve had to change my syllabus entirely. Things I had planned for this year, I’ve postponed. I’ve decided to develop some soft skills this year, for example. It’s an opportunity in this sense. For example, I no longer do written tests, but ask them to make a video. Or they do a presentation. With some students I did a lesson on multicultural societies. I made them listen to second-generation Italian guys being interviewed and we did a project on this together. Now I don’t give them the content, they give it to me. It’s something I’ve introduced more now. 

 Quando li fai entrare a casa tua, li fai davvero entrare a casa tua. When you let them into your home, you really let them into your home

 What they need now is contact. Some of them are, maybe not getting depressed, but I feel it’s essential for them to be sociable. Who’s being left behind in this is the “excellent” students, I think. Of course, also those that don’t have the necessary tools. My school has tried to identify those that didn’t have IT tools and tried to provide them. Those that weren’t doing so well, [the authorities] said they couldn’t fail the year anyway, so they lost that stimulus. 

My role has changed in the sense that it’s like you have to rebuild that relationship. When you let them into your home, you really let them into your home. Some of my colleagues introduced their cats to the students, I did some cooking classes, just so they knew that our relationship was still being nurtured. 

What keeps me going 

What keeps me going is the fact that I’m okay and know that I have people by my side, including my wife, friends, colleagues and students. I’ve tried to keep active from the start, I’m learning the guitar. 

One of the issues now is going to be having the students get used to face-to-face teaching again. Also, making the former “excellent” students, who have now let themselves go a bit, find that confidence again. They used to feed off their successes, so now they can’t even see the satisfaction of the teacher when they do well, they’ve let themselves go. 

My colleagues have been fantastic, we’re helping each other a lot and we keep in touch. We try to understand if there’s a problem with a student and try to solve it. We’ve also supported the teachers who are a bit older and weren’t able to use the computer well. There’s also support from our headteacher, who sends us guidelines and gives us an agenda of the things to do so we’re organised. Our authorities, however, haven’t given us much support. That was difficult because their guidelines were very confusing. We didn’t know what to do – ranging from how to use the class registers, to whether or not students could fail the year, to how many hours to teach… there wasn’t much help from the ministry and the government. They often addressed the students directly and neglected us, our needs, our expertise. 

My hope for the future 

In the future, we’ll need to be more careful with everything. We will have to develop new topics, which we have never addressed, like hygiene education or the importance of the public health system, what it means to be a good citizen and how the individual can contribute to the collective good.  

Dovremo sviluppare temi che non abbiamo mai sviluppato, tipo l’educazione all’igiene o l’importanza del sistema sanitario pubblico, l’importanza di essere un buon Cittadino. We will have to develop new topics, which we have never addressed, like hygiene education or the importance of the public health system, what it means to be a good citizen