A few weeks ago I started “teaching” English to these two adorable Italian kids who live in Nuovo Salario, a fancy neighborhood that is a twenty-minute train ride away (okay, well, plus a ten minute walk to the metro, two metro stops, then a twenty minute walk from the Nuovo Salario train station… it’s really about an hour total). Giacomo is two and a half and Eleonora (Ele, for short) turned five today and loves me to pieces. Giacomo is not as sold with me as Ele is, but if he’s in a good mood he likes me, and most of the time he’s n a good mood. So, you’re probably wondering why I say “teaching.” Well, it’s because by normal standards what I do when I go over to these kids’ house is not what I would call teaching. I basically play with them for two and a half hours, three days per week, and make sure they don’t crack their heads open when they jump off things. I speak English, we draw pictures, sing songs, read books, play at the playground near their apartment, the usual stuff. This is not my first endeavor into the English “teaching” world in Rome, however. Shortly after Kristin and I arrived we met with a man who runs his own English teaching school, which offers formal lessons to small groups of children. After a bit of “training” (i.e. watching a ridiculous video about the lessons in which the woman conducting them was wearing sweat pants – not sure how she thought people would take her seriously) I was ready to teach my first batch of youngsters and set off to their home. When I arrived it was clear that one of the little girls was terrified of me and when her brother arrived he proved himself to be Satan spawn. He pulled my hair, called me ugly (then his sister followed suit), then all hell broke loose and that’s when I decided that I wasn’t going to teach Italian kids any more. Since then I’ve been working as a tour guide, which has been slow and forced me to search for another source of income. Yes, it was back to teaching bratty Italian kids!
Well, I’m not sure how, but I really lucked out with this family. Not only are the kids adorable, but the parents are very nice, pay me well, both speak English, and the mom evens helps out with Giacomo. Despite the fact that I don’t feel like I’m really “teaching” them, I can tell that Giacomo and Ele are in fact learning English from hanging out with me and our daily renditions of the “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” song. Yesterday when Giacomo fell off his scooter he said “I fell down!” These two are always falling down (but usually not hurting themselves, which is good for me!), so it was no shock to me that they finally started to catch on in this respect. Ele also somehow seems to understand most of what I say very well and speaks very slowly in Italian so that I can understand her better.
It’s been interesting watching their own little language debacles in the last few weeks. We were going over “big and small” one day when Ele emphatically decided that something was “big-issimo.” It was adorable, but sadly I had to correct her before she went with it. “-Issimo” is the suffix which you add to Italian adjectives to make them superlative, so it was natural for Ele to assume that if she added “-issimo” to “big” she would be describing something as being “very big” in English. I think this struck me the most because I cannot imagine how confusing it would be for a child to learn another language, especially from a straniera (foreigner) who is only speaking to her in English. It must be even more confusing for poor young Giacomo, who sometimes mixes in English words into his Italian sentences. Ah, the price of being bilingual!
More reasons I love these kids: yesterday I gave Ele her birthday present; a very simple necklace that I made her. I scoured a bead shop near Piazza Navona to find a large hot pink glass bead, since Ele’s favorite color is “fuchsia,” which is really more of a hot pink in Italy than the purple it would be in the US. She was delighted when she opened up the small packet to find a necklace of her favorite color, but even more delighted when I told her that I made it. She bounced around the room for several minutes, declaring that she would wear it to school tomorrow and tell everyone that her nice American babysitter made it for her (and maybe in doing so would tell her friends about my strange habit of wearing dresses and sandals in March… when it’s 70 degrees F! That’s summer in Wisconsin!). Moments like yesterday make me really happy that I didn’t let those two bratty children in the first two weeks completely turn me off of working with Italian kids. Yes, most of them are brats, but if you’re really lucky you’ll luck out with two sweethearts who think you walk on water and make your heart feel “big-issimo.”
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