Marco Michelini

“There’s no motive”. Every one of us during our life has heard news and newspapers pronounce this sentence referring to crimes often very heinous.

Last month consulting an online magazine for work, a title caught my attention: Instagram, teenagers and mental health (https://www.filodiritto.com/instagram-adolescenti-e-health-mental). I read the opening: “Instagram is harmful to the mental health of young people, especially girls”. I jump. But what are they talking about?

The pandemic has brought the school back on the spot, highlighting problems that have existed for a long time: chicken coop classes, spaces that are not always adequate, devices that are essential for innovative teaching. These problems have been accompanied by numerous criticisms of a teaching focused on content and on a method of transmission. Certainly, interesting teaching methods have been proposed and tested. That is why my topic may seem a little out of fashion, because I would like to try to rehabilitate the much-mistreated content. I have been wondering for a long time whether one of the reasons for the students’ lack of interest in many school disciplines is in fact an inadequacy of the contents themselves.

In June, in the article “I feel terrible but I don’t ask for help” I addressed the cultural and psychological aspects that hinder a boy, aware of being ill, in approaching a psychotherapy. Today, I would like to talk about a much thornier subject instead, which concerns many young people who, although they are objectively very bad, do not realize it at all, however the people who live next to them can perfectly see it. It is something that crosses all social classes.

This is the way my students from the 5^th grade welcome me on their first day of school. Their eyes smile and their dreamy gaze captures me in a whirlwind of emotions. I look at them with curiosity. What is happening? Why do they not have the usual annoyed and almost tragic attitude of “the first days of school”?

This long summer is over but something new begins for so many young people and not only. The first day of school is approaching!!!! First day of kindergarten, first day of elementary school, middle school, high school. Who of us doesn’t remember the awaiting days on the first day of school? The emotion in front of that big door that marked the entry into a new world. The chaos of colourful backpacks, new faces of adults and children.

September arrived, it seemed far away last month, and yet it is here… after a strange busy summer, spent facing things, abandoning things, separating myself from things I had already separated, waiting for things and finding and re-finding things.

In recent years we have seen more and more frequently the outbreak of terrible fires. It is striking that most of the regions affected by these disasters are cold and rich in water. First Russia and now Canada passing across Australia.

Padrenostro is an award-winning movie for the best subject at Nastri d’Argento 2021. A well-deserved award. I watched the movie by chance a few months ago, and I found it really beautiful, in many ways, but the thing that struck me in particular was how the director managed to represent the inner life of the main character, Valerio, an 11-year-old boy who witnesses a terrorist ambush of his magistrate father, Alfonso, by a proletarian armed group.