It’s summer and there is a very strange weather because in the north there are thunderstorms and it’s cold while in the central south it’s terribly hot. It is as if Italy is divided, split in two just like they are trying to do with this Differentiated Autonomy law. I remember when I was a child the teacher would make a line on the blackboard and put the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other, and I never liked that, But today I understand that shaking off two thousand years of Cain and Abel is not easy
This line of demarcation continues even in our days in fact in school there are still the promoted and the failed and I think teachers should think a lot before failing a student because if a boy does not study there are always reasons and it seems to me a bit hasty to solve it with a failure, as was brilliantly written on this blog by Mariantonietta Rufini.
Some professors think that flunking is an educational method even if – hopefully – they do not reach the pearls of wisdom of our Minister of Education Valditara who enlightens us by telling us that humiliation is a growth factor. He, too, takes me back to when I was a child and the teacher to punish you for being “bad” would put you behind the blackboard. I had hoped those times were over but evidently Tradition fascinates this government. Before me there were the Balillas, who knows?
Many kids lash out at the professor because they think that the flunking is due to a dislike of them and maybe sometimes they are right but it is a kind of thinking that solves nothing.
What I see is that there are often recurring reactions to rejection. Some change schools immediately to get away from that teacher and extensively from that school but perhaps mostly because of the shame of being in the class with younger kids and seeing former classmates move on. Others have to do two years in one to erase the flunking, as if that difficult year was never there. Still others experience it in a very negative way, with a bad depression, beginning to think they are worthless, that they don’t measure up, and they change type of high school because that one is too difficult for them. Then there are those who take an even worse path, and that is to cast themselves in the role of the flunker, the one who is easygoing and doesn’t care but this exhibited identity actually hides and denies the idea of not being worth anything. And this role, this new “identity,” is likely to permanently alienate them from coming to terms with their real problems.
The thing we often hear from kids is that they have lost a year. I think it would be good to start to understand that this story of losing a year is not at all true even from a strictly material point of view because in life, after school, you often lose many more years. Besides, life is not a time trial.
However, one really risks losing a year if one does not understand what happened, what led to this negative result. Let’s be clear once and for all: being listless, not being able to concentrate, being disinterested in studying and therefore doing poorly in school is a symptom of something else that is wrong. There is not the child who is born willing and the child who is born listless. Although I am sure they are looking hard for it, I don’t think they will ever discover the gene that makes you not want to do shit!
So I say that such a year is not a lost year if intelligently one can turn the failure-which induces one to think of failure-into a situation instead of a crisis or rather of movement that can and should push us to try to understand what happened, why I did not commit myself, why I could not stay in the books, and from there the need to get help can also start but not in the sense of repetitions, no one is dumb, but of psychological help to overcome the crisis.
Schools should have far more duties than to fail pupils. Professors should ask themselves why they failed to engage the boy or why they did not care at all or, even worse, notice the delicate psychological situation the boy was experiencing. But I realize that in today’s school it is difficult to have the time to succeed in doing all this even though there are excellent professors who do manage to find the time (interest?).
But being able to turn the violence of insensitivity and coldness of the educational institution into an opportunity for research and growth is a demonstration of intelligence that
will enable us to save ourselves from further missteps later when situations are likely to be more complicated.
Marco Michelini
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