Sara Lazzaro

In perfect harmony with the national trend, our class has literally gone crazy for the TV series for weeks O’ mar for and now we only speak Neapolitan to each other! After all, the great success of the series is under everyone’s eyes so as to arouse reflections and analyzes everywhere, so we too wondered why it has suddenly become so famous among adolescents (and not only).

<<To teach Latin to Giovannino it is not enough to know Latin, above all you need to know Giovannino>> wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1762, in the Emilio.

The phrase is so shareable that today it seems obvious. Yet in the school system that I know and experience every day”get to know Giovannino” is too often not a priority. It is as if the axis had moved only on the performance of all the actors in the school (including teachers) and not on the relationship between the actors which is the platform for any learning possibility.

Ferdinand is an Albanian army officer, we are in January 1997 and his life up to that moment is an open window on the future: youth, a promising career, a girlfriend, a homeland …. but Albania is a country in turmoil, exhausted in 1991 from half a century of Communism opens wildly to neoliberal economic policies made of privatizations and free market that, After a few years, they lead to the bankruptcy of the main financial companies and the risk of a civil wa . It is January 16, 1997 and begins a period consigned to the annals as “Albanian anarchy”. It’s winter, the cold wind freezes the bones and yet the revolt spreads throughout the country, in the streets you can breathe smoke and gunpowder, blood begins to flow.

Latina, 12 years old writes a farewell letter and attempts suicide by throwing herself from the school window”. What’s going on? Why didn’t anyone do anything?

In Latina, our city, last week a young girl of just twelve, after writing a farewell note, attempted suicide by throwing herself from the window of her school. The lawn below the window cushioned the fall avoiding the death of the young woman who is now hospitalized. This is one of those news that hits you like a punch to the stomach maybe because of her young age or maybe because she is a student like us. The next morning, in classroom, we were all a bit upset and so we talked a lot about it to try to understand how we can get to make such an absurd gesture that certainly concerns mental health. Typing “mental health” the online dictionary reports: Mental health, a broad concept that refers to a state of general well-being of the individual and does not end in the mere absence of pathology or discomfort of any kind … In short, it is something complicated that is not limited to being crazy or not. Yet continuing to search we read that the death rate among adolescents is already alarming, but if we analyze the data, we discover that we are facing a real emergency, that is, the number of suicides and psychic disorders among young people are constantly increasing.

This year I teach in a second class. In the morning I enter in the classroom and look at my students: some are always sulking, closed in a melancholy difficult to scratch, others are constantly in motion, volcanoes erupting with life, others still have the smile of youth that always illuminates their faces. My students are a field of sunflowers with which I try to cultivate horizons. It is never easy, because if they understand that they can be trusted, that you really care about how they are and how they will become, then they ask a lot, they demand that you see them even when they challenge you with the bored air of those who would like to be somewhere else.

A few days ago our Italian teacher proposed us the documentary: THE BODY OF WOMEN
by Lorella Zanardo, thus making us reflect on the role of the female figure on TV. Every day,
in programs and advertisements are offered where, too often, women appear as simple
bodies whose only function is to attract male attention, as if the deepest reality of the female
should absolutely not to emerge. Think, for example, of the Libero program by Teo
Mammuccari, aired starting from 2000, where the young Flavia Vento was heavily mocked
by the conductor in front of millions of spectators while she was locked up, every evening, in
a Plexiglas cage under a table. Faced with the numerous criticisms of the press and public
opinion, the conductor at the time replied << I don’t understand the reason for all these controversies: the girl is a living sculpture and in the cage she also has holes to breathe! >>

On Thursday, September 8, the news of the death of the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, quickly went around the world, interrupting with an impressive media force the ordinary everyday life of a September afternoon. Immediate reactions due to heads of State or famous people but also the curiosity, sometimes morbid, of ordinary people. After all, the “blue blood” is not for everyone, and in any case, whether we like it or not, Elizabeth II was certainly an important protagonist of the twentieth century. Yet this prosopopoeia celebrating the political and human greatness of the Queen bothers me.

The school, in training, must reject the business model.

<<Do kids have to know what they’re going to do when they grow up? >> asks us Dr. Valeria Verna in the beautiful article “COMMUNICATIVE INTENTIONALITY” published last week on this blog, naturally calling into question the world of school. The answer that emerges immediately is: <<absolutely no!>>.

From Wednesday 22 June the State Exams began and I accompany my students of the fifth class in this last “test”. This year I feel very strongly the responsibility to be up to the task, I feel that this exam still so terribly and unnecessarily structured must become their realization. Perhaps because the boys arrive there after two and a half years of pandemic, first perceived as “an apocalypse” and now already derubricated by the general interest or perhaps because we are in the middle of a war, also this in a very short time transformed into something ordinary, to be forgotten soon, because in short, there is but what do you want to do!