Nobody seemed to know when I was starting work. I went into school so many times before I went away for the training course in Rome. I wasn’t asking that much of them, just basic things like ‘what day do i start’ and ‘do i have a timetable’, but this is Sicily and these things don’t come that simply.
My course (which was excellent) was on the 1st and 2nd October. I explained this over and over to all concerned at the school, and explained that I would come to work on the 3rd (yesterday).
‘No, the 3rd is a Sunday’ she said
‘No it’s not, it’s a Wednesday’
She first thought it was a language problem, after all days of the week are a bit tricky, but I insisted and she looked at the calendar.
‘Okay, pop in some time on the 3rd’
So that’s what I did yesterday, but the secretary concerned wasn’t there. I asked in a nearby office, they didn’t know and suggested I come back today. I turned up first thing and stood in the corridor for about a quarter of an hour because the secretary wasn’t there. I knew that most of the English teachers are on a trip to England at the moment, so I really didn’t know whether I was starting work today or else when they come back in 10 days.
A lovely administrative lady found me and took me to her office to fix up my contract. She’s one of these people with a heart of gold who is worried all the time that she might be doing something marginally wrong - if I’d told her I’d been expecting her to jump out the window, she would probably have apologised and thrown herself out. She gave me a lot of help, and timidly asked me if I’d give her son English lessons. I said yes, of course. We had to send a few documents back to Leeds, and she was so worried that ‘UK’ wouldn’t be an adequate indication of the country it had to go to that in the end I let her write ‘Inghilterra’ on the envelope too, which calmed her fragile nerves. What a nice lady.
At a certain point, a member of staff came to find me and said that the English teacher was waiting for me. I said I had to finish the contract, but would be along in 5 minutes.
‘Okay, well they’re in classroom four’. What?! A classroom? Today? Right... okay.
We finished the contract, and I asked the lovely lady to walk me to the room. She knocked, posted me inside and left. I found myself at the front of a class of Italian teenagers. I introduced myself to the teacher, who in turn gave the briefest of introductions to the class about who I was before taking a seat and inviting me to ‘go ahead’. So I had to give an impromtu lesson. I managed it, I just asked them all their names and then went through some vocab from the text book. They were quite excited that I was there, so my job was very easy. The lesson finished, and I walked with the teacher, and found out that we had another two lessons. I was literally planning it minute-by-minute, I split them into groups to do little tasks, made them repeat things after me, and chatted about England. They were great students, very welcoming and very easily amused. I feigned some kind of authority, and they didn’t seem to notice that I had no idea what I was doing.
I went home after the three lessons and a chat with some of the staff, got changed and went out for a few errands. I kept on seeing the students about. The centre is small, and the vast majority of my time is spent on this same street so it’s inevitable that they’ll see me around a lot. I’m not anonymous in this town anyway, so I guess it doesn’t make a whole load of difference.
It was a great first day, an enormous contrast to how uncertain everything was yesterday. I’m likely to get a timetable in a couple of weeks when the other teachers come back and they can split my hours between them, but in the meantime I’m just keeping the two remaining English teachers company a lot of the time. They both have a day off tomorrow so I do too, and then I’m doing four hours on Saturday. She says that with two of the classes we’re doing ‘feelings’, so I am precisely one word more knowledgable than I was before about what I’ll be doing. It’s a relief to have the ball rolling though, I’m not just waiting for it to start any more.
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