Nothing is like before. We have all been deprived of the freedom to go out, to be able to meet and embrace the loved ones, to be able to decide whether to go for a walk through the streets of the center or take a trip to a park or to one of the many places full of history and of culture. Libraries and museums are closed. Buying a dress has also become a forbidden dream. In a moment we found ourselves without life, perhaps monotonous and not always pleasant, but substantially normal than before.
Even the school had to change its ways of existing. To say it seems almost absurd, but millions of teachers who, until then, had started experimenting with digital teaching, who with pleasure who for constraint, were practically catapulted within an afternoon or so into the creation of virtual classes and driven to download many applications to reach their students at any cost and in any way.
The function of the teacher is very important: the teacher is not only a dispenser of notions and information. The teachers are weavers of social plots, embroiderers of values, mediators of culture; continuing to do school right now means maintaining a sense of everyday life and normality and not ceasing to trace that continuous and constant path that keeps us human, alive.
We are experiencing a great moment of growth (everyone, students and teachers) and those who work as educators know how difficult it is to maintain balance in these circumstances. We try to use rationality to educate and inform, without terrifying. In silence, between PC and telephone, we continue to push young people towards culture, beauty, civic sense, but above all towards hope, always giving them our best smile and the most thoughtful words.
We teachers continue to work every day not because it is important to finish the program, not because we want to force pupils to study. We are happy to still be able to reach every single student while staying at home and to be able to do our job at best, respecting good standards, for one reason only: we care about our children. We will never leave them alone and continue to carry them within us well beyond the sound of the bell, well beyond the report card given at the end of the year.
They remain as fragments of our soul, unique and irreplaceable: the boy from the first desk always attentive and ready to offer you the book, the somewhat absent-minded boy who always welcomes you with a hug and a smile, the teenager who can answer in a way spicy with the gaze of a child who wants to feel great, the studious girl who takes a few low marks for a first crush, the shy and introverted girl who greets you with smiling eyes … and we don’t want their smile to go out and let themselves go to fear and despair.
In these days we teach to keep in touch with normalcy, to save one’s soul and mind with culture, to learn hope, to look at the world with rationality and maturity… and they are teaching us that the best of men it comes out in difficulties and that culture can be a bridge to the future; they tell us that we have to build this bridge together. We feel like crying for all THANKS who tell us, as if even a message for them was a breath of air; for the hearts sent in their responses, because they feel loved and reciprocate.
Classes are not teachers who teach and pupils who learn; they are a community of affections that matures and grows together in the name of culture and hope for the future.
And it is true, every now and then a few tears drop when we think of our empty classrooms, the bell that does not ring, the teachers’ room without our chatter, the cheerful voices of our students and the blackboard that has waited without any writing for days; but we will have plenty of time to recover a smile, a caress and an explanation interrupted by laughter or the buzz of those who continue to chat softly.
