The sultry heat embraces the city, giving that strange sensation of apparent calm that is typical of summer. The body sweats too much, the air seems still… there is an obligation to move as little as possible, freeze the image. Maybe this is why in the summer you can think a lot… the body in energy saving mode, the mind having so much fun going exactly where you don’t want to… It’s time for separations and this year I have to make important ones.
I leave my comfort zone, 30 years of teaching, hundreds of lives of teenagers who have crossed mine, colleagues, spaces, familiar walls, the road that took me to school every day. My thoughts go back to the image of the dinner at the end of the school year, between chips and coca cola, smiling glances from excited kids who gave me a framed photo: a shot of me and them posing in front of a statue during the educational visit to Rome. The photo was accompanied by a note, <<Have you seen Prof?…in the end your sunflowers have bloomed. We are happy for her but also a little sad, because we will miss her very much.>>. I hugged them one by one, tears of emotion and my heart exploding. But how beautiful you are! What a gift you have given me! Perhaps the secret is precisely this, being happy and sad at the same time, experiencing the melancholy of detachment while embracing change.
I don’t know the destination yet, I could end up anywhere in Italy but I know that I’ve been building this change for some time. It was born from the allergic reactions to the inaction of the educational system, from the indignation towards some old educational regurgitations (in recent days another pearl has emerged: inserting the “seriously insufficient” evaluation in primary school!), it was born from the awareness that it is necessary to fight the idea of school as a place for preparing and measuring high-performance individuals. How bad is this history of performance and, if I think about it, also the whole question of inclusion with which they have been bombarding us for years, in most schools it focuses only on “inclusive practices” as a tool for “normalizing” diversity and not on the construction of inclusive environments for all, aimed at the human fulfillment of students.
Will I be able to change things as a manager? I don’t know but trying with all of myself has become an internal urgency that I can’t ignore. It was precisely those hundreds of lives of adolescents who passed through my story that made me understand this, the meetings experiences, the long research that gave meaning to who I was as a teacher, as a person and to what I want to become “And if it’s worth the risk I’ll gamble the last piece of my heart” Che Guevara said… I don’t know why it comes to mind but it fits perfectly as a starting phrase for this new journey.
It’s time for separations… of course it’s hard but how nice it is to get back on the road because yes, it’s worth it…
Sara lazzaro
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