The following morning at class Wendy decided she would play a game with us as she got the 'why are you making us do a tense that no-one speaks?' vibes. Looking at her, there was something familiar about her - something of me that I saw in her. I thought it might have been blonde curly hair or even seeing someone that looked like Victoria Wood and that just made me feel at home. It took me a long while before it occurred to me what it was.
Her teaching style.
I had taught for two weeks at a summer camp near Brescia, and if you've read the posts, you'll have seen that things didn't really go to plan. I wasn't the best teacher and I lacked real drive or experience. I knew teaching wasn't for me and so although I'd put my all into my class, I knew I was still a bit rubbish.
Most of my lesson plans fell through in one way or the other, and because I hadn't taught for very long I didn't have an arsenal of games and ideas to fill in if my class got bored, or started going native. The knowledge I had of English grammar was very formal and linguistic. I could explain the subjunctive mode to my class, but this was little use when they were still on 'do you have'.
Unfortunately I wasn't the right fit for that job, and it was that I recognised in Wendy. She had decided to play the 'who am I?' game, where you ask yes/no questions so that you can guess who the person is masquerading as.
Wendy went first. We got down to a sportman who also did some writing. I looked around. None of my classmates were even remotely interested in sport. The two blokes we had weren't the type of guys who spend Saturday in the pub watching the footy, and the girls didn't really seem to case about any kind of sport. It was down to me.
The writing thing flummoxed me. I didn't know of any Italian sportmen that were also writers. I guessed as many Italian footballers as I could and then gave up. We all gave up.
'Io sono Francesco Totti' says Wendy.
Ahhhh. Now it makes sense. Though not a terribly clever chap, Signor Totti has written a few books here and there.
We played this game for a little while longer but it soon transpired that sportmen and women weren't the only people of little interest to my classmates. They just weren't interested in anything really. Wendy abbandoned the game and we went back to the passato remoto.
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