Valeria Verna

Summer is a time of holidays and lightness, so I allow myself the luxury of reflections on the school from the right distance.

I start almost as a game with questioning what is the etymology of the term “school”. I read on the Treccani website: “Term derived from the Latin schŏla (from the Greek scholé), which originally meant (as otium for the Latins) leisure, pleasant use of one’s intellectual dispositions, regardless of any need or practical purpose, and later the place where one expects to study, meaning the latter in which it is still in use.”.

I consider the summer break to be an integral part of a psychotherapy aimed at healing. In so-called supportive psychotherapy, the summer break is instead an accident of which you try to limit the damage by maintaining contact with the patient through phone calls, texts or other ways, all things that increase addiction. Frankly, I find it difficult to consider psychotherapy as what aims to support but I do not want to open a topic here that would be too long.

Making images or being images, what’s the difference? I took this photograph from four years ago after a little research of stories created “on the road”. Seeing it again I am struck by the girl posing smiling with one of the melons fallen from the container of the truck that had overturned along the highway to Siena a few hours earlier. Who knows if she thought of being portrayed like this herself or if it was suggested to her. To her left, another woman is taking a picture of the pile of fruit and of the truck lying on its side like a pachyderm. The cones around, the deviation signs and the cork on the ground say that many people have already passed by, setting it up hour after hour with new clues.

In these days I have come across the observation of Daniel Pennac on the students who “are bad at school”, those deemed “without future” that, too often, the school leaves behind, condemning them to failure at school. The author represents them as an “onion” that enters school with “several layers” of dissatisfaction and frustrations accumulated over time, brought to class as a burden hidden in the backpack, heavy and misunderstood by adults.

March 2020: the separation

Suddenly, one day in March of 2020, lockdown begins. At the same time, our online listening desk for schools opened as well.

All families find themselves living a new and unprecedented reality: parents and children, necessarily together, together forever, 24 hours a day, without the possibility of separating.

The young ones up to that moment were used to live a daily life separated from their parents, in which they faced the didactics, the questions and the tests, the relationship with friends and with the teachers on their own. A whole world in which they could put themselves on the line in complete autonomy! This on one hand made the kids responsible, but at the same time certain illnesses and critical situations could not be seen by parents who met with their kids only at dinner time.

The lack of separation from the family context during the lockdown has sometimes highlighted the inability to stay together but even and especially not to know how to say NO when a relationship became stifling, maybe when there wasn’t even room to get away and work out a difficult relationship.

And so, many kids started writing to us…

In life it can happen that every single event can have much deeper meanings than we imagine and that, even if distant in time, we carry them with us, continuing to elaborate and experiment them until we understand how much they really mean.

I am sure that someone will recognize this process in the exams taken at school in what are the most difficult passages of our life. Middle school and high school. Where everything changes. A real transformation of body and mind takes place. And it’s not always that simple not to feel cramped. We often look for a rebellion that sometimes takes us away from the freedom we crave so much and the world seems such a small place to us.

According to the DSM-5 stuttering, Inserted in communication disorders, is defined according to the age of onset: we therefore speak of Evolutionary Stuttering (Fluence Disorder with onset in childhood) and Late-onset Stuttering (Disorder of fluency with onset in adulthood).

Doing some research I read about the neuropsychomotricist Maddalena Saccoccio … “specialized in the age group 0-3 years, I mainly deal with problems related to the motor, communication and relational sphere, … practices and therapies that have in common the aim of facilitating the relationship, the attachment between the newborn and their parents or those who take care of them, favoring the individual well-being and of the entire family nucleus and to prevent subsequent difficulties and disorders of various kinds “…

The 2019 Consensus Conference regarding language disorders expresses itself as follows: “… to date the wealth of knowledge produced by the international scientific literature on DPL (Primary Language Disorders) still presents, on some specific junctions of the therapeutic diagnostic path, areas of uncertainty … (…)