Italian education, Ross

Another Rite of Passage Completed

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Italian Middle School Exams

The Italian education system is big on exams. Ross did pass her middle school exam, with a grade of Buono (on a scale of Ottimo, Distinto, Buono, Sufficiente, Insufficiente – outstanding, distinguished, good, sufficient, insufficient). This was better than I’d expected, since most of her grades this year have been merely sufficiente. But she worked the system brilliantly.

Her results on the written tests were a mix. The test of written Italian was simply to write an essay, which Ross does well (even better when she takes a little time to concentrate on her spelling and punctuation). Math she only did half of, and probably that half badly; English was a joke for her, and French seems to have gone well. On average, a passing grade, I guess (we were not given the individual test grades).

Then she had about ten days to study for the oral. I was in a panic; I’d been told that the panel of teachers could ask almost anything that had been covered throughout the year. But her math tutor advised her to go and watch some of her friends’ orals. This she did, and also talked with some other kids. One told her he had prepared mini-essays on the specific topics he wanted to talk about, and the teachers seemed pleased to be given these before he started. Then he gave his prepared presentations, and managed to steer the exam to the topics where he felt best prepared.

While watching her friends, Ross observed that her beloved music teacher was slumped in his chair, feeling left out. After all the major subjects had been covered, he would forlornly ask a question or two, and be met with blank looks. “Did you even bring your music notebook?” he would ask in desperation. No one had.

So Ross sat down and wrote an essay about jazz, specifically on swing music during WWII (inspired by Jazz : A Film By Ken Burns – the accompanying booklet came in very handy). She chose her topics in other subjects to match: WWII for history, the atomic bomb for science. She also took in advice from her (very supportive) art teacher: “Talk about your artwork, and for god’s sake, don’t burst into tears! I expect better from you.” Not that Ross was likely to do so, but several of her classmates had sobbed through their orals.

When Ross’ exam began, she handed out her essays, then the teachers asked her what she wanted to talk about first. “I’d like to talk about jazz,” she said. The French teacher elbowed the music teacher: “Hey! It’s your subject!” He sat up and got very enthusiastic, and they had a long conversation about jazz. Then Ross spoke about the other subjects, except the atomic bomb – many kids had already talked about this, and the math/science teacher was bored of hearing it. So she picked a topic that Ross hadn’t studied and didn’t remember much about. Oh, well.

Ross had put her art pieces into a presentation binder, and spoke about each one, explaining what famous painting it was inspired by (or copied from), with some biography of the original artist. She came home quite confident that she had passed; we all heaved a sigh of relief.

Part of the exam ritual is to go and see the grades as soon as they are posted outside the school, for all to see. Ross and I were pleasantly surprised by the buono, which put her at or above the average for the class. Her Italian teacher came by on her way to a meeting, and we thanked her for the year’s work. I said I was pleased with the exam result. “There was some negotiation over that,” she replied, with a significant lift of the eyebrow. Ah, yes, the math teacher, who didn’t like Ross’ attitude or lack of math ability (“How is it possible when your father’s a math professor…?” Poor Ross has been hearing that all her life.)

I just smiled; I had a pretty good idea who had negotiated vigorously on Ross’ behalf. Half an hour later, I was standing in line to pick up Ross’ exit papers, and the music teacher ran by, late for the staff meeting. He saw me, and gave me a huge grin.

As I also mentioned earlier, cheating is widespread in Italian schools. I was writing that piece while Ross was doing her English written exam, which for her was simple and soon over.

She came home and said casually: “I’ve found a way to earn some money: I wrote Martino’s English test for him.” We were, of course, aghast. He hadn’t actually paid her, had simply asked her to do it – and, much to my disgust, she did.

After half an hour of hearing from two very angry parents a host of reasons as to why this wasn’t a good thing, she probably won’t be doing it again… or at least next time she won’t tell us!

In response to that original article, an Italian friend wrote me that, during an exam in electronics technical school, his whole class cheated together, with the assistance of their teacher. This was because one of the exam questions was on something so obscure and bizarre that you would never do it in real life, and it required the cooperation of the whole group searching through the library to find the answer. I guess the question succeeded brilliantly as a test of teamwork.

next: high school

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Italian language

Naming a Multicultural Baby

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Having been saddled all my life with a name that no one can spell or pronounce, I am always curious about how people get their names – especially, of course, the unusual ones. In July, 2003, the New York Times ran an article about what people are naming their kids, based on the Social Security Administration’s data on popular baby names; the writer, expecting her own child, used this as the basis for research on what not to name her baby.

The upside of having an unusual name is that you’ll probably be the only person of that name in any given group. At UC Santa Cruz, I learned that a girl in my college was called Deidre, which she pronounced “Day-dree” (I’m Deirdré pronounced “Dear-druh”) – close enough for me to get excited about it, though she wasn’t impressed. Things got very weird when we ended up sharing a house the following summer, along with a third woman (named Mary). Since no one could spell or pronounce either of us, poor Mary never knew who the phone messages were for.

If you’re Italian, you most likely know someone else with the same name as you. According to my friend at Zoomata.com (and my own observations), most Italians have traditional names out of the calendar of Catholic saints, though they may get them by way of a grandparent or other relative. (The exceptions to the saints are classical Roman names such as Olivia, Livia, Lavinia, Massimo.) This gives parents a very limited pool of names to choose from, and non-standard names are rare.

The result is that, for any given name, you probably know a bunch of people who have it. Enrico and I can never refer to “Paola” without having to qualify which of several Paolas we’re talking about. Enrico himself is in the fortunate category of names which are easily recognized and not considered weird, but uncommon enough that you probably don’t know more than one. Well, maybe two.

When we had to choose a name for our own baby, we had several criteria to consider. We didn’t know that we were having a girl (we had asked not to be told, and when people asked us “What are you having?” we answered: “A baby.”); nonetheless, by some instinct, we put a lot more thought into a girl’s name than a boy’s. We wanted a name that would be easily spelled and pronounced by both sides of the family, and that might somehow signify the baby’s multiculturalness. Among others, I considered one of my favorite Indian names, Gayatri, but Enrico was afraid that would be too weird for Italy, though I argued that it’s similar to a classic Latin name, Gaia.

I initially wanted to choose a “Rose” based name, to honor my beloved aunt Rosie (Roselyn), who had been a friend as much as a relative, and an important influence on my personality and attitude. But Enrico didn’t like the Italian names Rosalia or Rosalinda – he said they sounded old-maidish. (Perhaps they were more southern Italian and/or old-fashioned).

We were reading Gone with the Wind at the time; we used to read together, alternating chapters so that Enrico could hear my English pronounciation, and practice his own with corrections from me. Yes, hang on, this is relevant. When the film “Gone with the Wind” reached Italy just after WWII, the heroine’s name was translated as Rossella O’Hara. The name Rossella, meaning “little red” (originally applied to redheads) already existed in Italy, but was extremely rare until the film came along. Then it suddenly became popular, so there is a generation of Rossellas, just over 50 years old now.

“Rossella” seemed like a good name for several reasons: being best known as the Italian translation of a very American character, and that character being a strong, resourceful woman (though she certainly has her flaws). I thought it would be fairly easily spelled and pronounced by Americans, though that has proven not to be true; everyone wants to spell it with only one S, and pronounce it accordingly: Rozella. It’s a long O and a soft S: Rohss-ella (don’t forget to roll the R!). Rossella herself generally tells English-speakers to call her Ross (rhymes with “Boss”).

The name, after a period of popularity in Italy, went into decline again and isn’t used much these days, so we thought our Rossella wasn’t likely to be confused with any other Rossella in her age group. This, too, proved not to be true: there was another Rossella in her elementary class.

But we didn’t know these things when she was born. As I held my beautiful new baby in my arms, the labor nurse asked me: “What are you going to name her?”

“Rossella.”

“Oh, that’s beautiful. And thank god it isn’t Morgan or Brittany.”

 

^ top: 1989, the year of our daughter’s birth, was the 50th anniversary of the releases of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz; these commemorative stamps were issued in the US.

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living in Italy

Housing: How Italians Live

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During my July trip to the US, I stayed with friends in different cities and types of homes, giving me fodder for reflection on differences in customs, styles, and expectations for housing in the US and Italy.

As I have mentioned before, renting an unfurnished apartment in Italy means completely unfurnished, so for our new home in Lecco we’ve had to put in a kitchen (including the sink) and all the appliances. (A friend here told me that she once looked at a place to rent which didn’t even have toilets!)

Appliances are different here. Refrigerators are smaller. Traditionally, Italian mammas shop for fresh food daily, so don’t need as much storage space for perishables, although the trend nowadays is to less-frequent visits to larger supermarkets, which leads to larger fridges.

In Italy, almost everyone has a (clothes) washing machine in their home, often installed in the kitchen or a bathroom (our second bathroom has a special washer-sized alcove, with pipes). In the US you’ll find shared, coin-operated machines in the basements of some apartment/condo buildings, but I’ve never seen this in Italy. Coin-operated storefront laundromats are a recent phenomenon here, and probably exist only in the big cities.

With an Italian home washing machine, a single load of laundry can take two hours, depending on the water temperature you select, because the washers heat their own water. This makes sense, since many homes have only one small, electric boiler to heat water for the shower and kitchen.

Most Italians don’t have clothes dryers. They are available, but, given the cost of electricity here (twice what Americans pay), a dryer would be very expensive to run. And dryers are bad for natural-fiber clothing – I much prefer line drying. We have a large drying rack out on the balcony which gets sun every afternoon, so things dry quickly. In winter, the trick is to hang wet clothes on or near the radiators, which humidifies the air as well as drying the clothes. In Milan I had mini drying racks designed to hang on the radiators. (In Switzerland, there is a communal drying area in the basement of some buildings. I don’t think Italians trust each other enough for that.)

Plugging in appliances can be a challenge. There are three types of electrical outlets in current use in Italy, plus one weird one that apparently enjoyed only brief popularity (I’ve only seen it in my in-laws’ former apartment in Rome). There are also variants on the two basic plugs, with or without grounding (many older buildings don’t have it, and it’s expensive to add). Aside from the grounding, it’s never been clear to me whether one type of outlet is safer or can carry more load than another. If you’ve got something that has to be plugged in at a particular spot and the plugs don’t match, you either use an adapter or change the plug on the appliance. There are never enough outlets in Italian homes; sometimes entire walls have no outlets, which can play havoc with room arrangements.

There never seems to be enough capacity, either. My in-laws’ Rome apartment was big, but very inadequately wired; you could never have two major appliances on at the same time. At night we always had to think about which bathroom water heater was already heated up and which needed to be turned on in preparation for morning showers; everything else had to be turned off before running the dishwasher, otherwise the fuses would trip and we’d have fumble our way down to the basement in the dark to turn the power back on. Here in Lecco, I’ve discovered, I can’t run the dishwasher and washing machine at the same time (this wasn’t an issue in Milan; our kitchen was too small to hold a dishwasher).

Homes are constructed differently, too. Basic building materials in Italy are concrete, brick, and sometimes stone. In the mountains, some houses are chalet-style, made of thick wooden planks. In the US, most modern houses are wood framed, with wooden or aluminum siding or stucco outside, and sheetrock inside. By European standards, they’re flimsy, and they catch fire easily. Fire trucks screaming down the street are a common sight in the US; in Europe, they’re rare. The few city fires I’ve heard of in Italy were in factories, though we do have a big problem with forest fires in the summer.

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Everyday Movies

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I’m astonished at how regular a part of my life movies have become these days. When I was a kid in Bangkok, few English-language movies were shown, still fewer that were suitable for kids. I dimly remember Camelot (very long – I fell asleep before the depressing ending), being scared at Diamonds are Forever, and The Wizard of Oz – which I didn’t see very well because I had forgotten my glasses, not yet being used to carrying them with me.

At the end of every film in Thailand, they played the national anthem while showing patriotic pictures of the king and the flag. Everyone had to stand to attention until it was over, so there would be a stampede during the final credits to get out of the theatre before the anthem began. The authorities eventually caught on, and enforced respect by playing the anthem right before the film started.

In Pittsburgh we had TV, which was a novelty to me. We had only gotten a TV in Bangkok in 1969 to see the moon landing, which everyone stayed up all night to watch. Thai TV didn’t show much at all in those days, let alone in English, so after the moon show was over, the TV went out to the servants’ quarters. I would sometimes go there to watch Bewitched; you could get the English soundtrack by tuning to a special station on the radio.

Back in the States, I liked some shows, especially Saturday morning cartoons, but I never got used to the American attitude towards television. In many households it was (and still is) constantly on, which I found distracting; I couldn’t just ignore it or half-watch it, blaring away in a corner, as everyone else seemed to do. I would go to a friend’s house to visit and play, and be disappointed because she’d want to watch TV; this was not my idea of a social activity.

When I was in 7th grade, the public television station PBS began showingMonty Python’s Flying Circus late on Tuesday nights, followed by the International Animation Festival; it was a great treat for me to be allowed to stay up til 11 to watch both.

American TV also gave me a chance to catch up on classic movies I had missed. “The Wizard of Oz” was shown once a year, around Thanksgiving, and it was a very big deal, advertised for weeks beforehand. One year Dunkin Donuts came out with their “Dunkin Munchkins” (the holes instead of the donuts), and used this annual TV event to launch them. Then there were the classic Christmas movies like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman sung by Burl Ives. (I never liked those; I preferred real animation.)

In 1976, we moved to Bangladesh, and were again cut off from English-language media. (We entertained ourselves by making music – no bad thing, but a topic for another article.) One of the American government services showed a film once a week; they were mostly films I didn’t particularly want to see, but I’d go out of sheer boredom, with the result that I wouldn’t sleep for weeks after seeing things like Carrie.

Up at Woodstock, we didn’t even have that. The school would show a film once a semester or so. It never occurred to me to go see a Hindi movie in town, partly because my Hindi wasn’t that good. Once or twice we saw English films at Picture Palace. I was mystified by the popularity of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, a pair of apparently English actors who made a series of farcical westerns, very popular in India; how was it that I’d never heard of them in the States? I learned many years later that they’re both Italian, and the films were shot entirely in Italy; both were still making silly movies when I moved to Italy in 1991.

During my Woodstock years, my dad moved back to Thailand, where mass entertainment had come a long way. There was more TV, though I only watched The Muppet Show, again listening to the English soundtrack on the radio. Movie theatres were now equipped with glassed-in sections where you could sit if you wanted to hear the English soundtrack, and all the big Hollywood movies reached Bangkok not long after their US release. There were also “movie restaurants,” where you could eat a meal while watching a movie.

During home leave in the States in the summer of 1979, I gorged on movies, forcing my dad to accompany me to The Muppet Movie (he fell asleep) andDracula, but refusing to see Alien (“In space, no one can hear you scream” – but in the theatre they would have!). And I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Showfor the first – but far from last – time.

My university years were film heaven. I took a film course at UC Santa Cruz, analyzing such classics as The Rules Of The Game, Rome: Open City, andPather Panchali. Santa Cruz being the funky alternative town that it is, there were several art house theatres. My boyfriend and I got carded going to see the X-rated gay film Taxi zum Klo. Even when she’d established that we were old enough, the ticket seller asked: “Are you sure you want to see this?” We did, and found it mostly funny, and very touching at the end.

When I transferred to the University of Texas, I was delighted to discover that the Student Union cinema showed about 15 different movies a week, plus there were other film societies around campus, and of course lots of theatres in town for the first-run stuff, and friends to go see them all with. (Poor John, I was still a wimp – I dumped popcorn all over him after swearing I wasn’t scared inSomething Wicked This Way Comes.)

When I visited my dad in Indonesia in 1984, I feared movie withdrawal. My attempt to see a movie in Semarang, during an earlier visit, had been a disaster – it was A Fistful of Dollars, not bad in itself, but smoking was allowed in Indonesian cinemas, and everyone smokes clove cigarettes. After 3 or 4 hours of Sergio Leone, you come out smelling like a baked ham.

In Jakarta, however, we had the video man. Videocassette players were well established by this time, but not video rental stores. So this guy would come around once a week with huge cases of videos; you could pick as many as you wanted, and pay a small fee to keep them for the week. All pirated, of course, which made for great variety. We even saw an Australian television mini-series about an ugly rich woman whose husband dumps her into an crocodile-infested swamp to be eaten. Unbeknownst to him, she survives. After extensive cosmetic surgery and a long recovery, she is unrecognizably gorgeous and bent on revenge… why on earth does this thing stick in my mind?

My daughter’s generation is growing up with no concept of media scarcity. We have a VCR and DVD player, and a large collection of films in both formats. Blockbuster Video arrived in Italy years ago, and our local one in Milan had a small section of English-language tapes. Now, with DVD, there are multiple soundtracks, so language is no longer a problem. My only gripe with Blockbuster is that they don’t have classic or unusual films (I remember fondly a video rental shop near a friend’s house in San Francisco that I could have spent a lifetime exploring). So I end up buying a lot of the older films that I want to see. (I’ve discovered that the HMV shop at Heathrow Terminal 1 almost always has something interesting on sale, cheap.)

Ross’ generation also doesn’t realize how privileged they are to be able to watch a film over and over again, something you used to be able to do only in film courses. If you have a small child and a VCR, you’re familiar with the phenomenon: a kid will watch the same movie constantly for weeks or months, in the same way she might demand a beloved story every night for weeks or months. Ross has long outgrown Disney movies; she now watches Stanley Kubrick films, over and over. My 14-year-old film auteur.

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Italian culture

That Old College Spirit

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Everyone in the world finds it cool to have logos and words from other parts of the world on their T-shirts. Here in Italy, you’d be surprised at how many people seem to have attended American Ivy League universities, until you realize that there are university logo shirts are for sale at many shops that have absolutely no connection to any of these institutions. Ironically, they’ll pile up a bunch of different universities together in one stack of shirts. At a Milanese shop currently in with the teenybopper crowd, there are shirts with Disney characters (unlicensed, I bet – there’s no copyright notice on them), “Cuba” in Coke-style lettering, and Georgetown University. I caused my daughter agonies of embarassment by asking the shopgirl: “Why Georgetown, in particular?” No other universities were represented in this particular shop, so I thought maybe the owner actually had some connection to it. The girl was merely confused; she had never heard of Georgetown University, and had no idea why they carried that particular logo.

The funniest shirt I’ve seen around lately says “The University of Yale.” I’m pretty sure the Yale regents did not approve that one.

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Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia