The silences, the shadows cast by the streetlights, that patina of droplets organizing on car bodies. And I could go on and on with all the little elements that make a race done in the evening special.
Before the lockdown, I had never contemplated training after dark for one basic reason: my routes were all in open country and my small town lacks bike lanes. The health emergency, in addition to emptying the streets of cars at particular times of the day, has made me discover a novelty, especially in the winter period. Once November arrived, in fact, the return to daylight saving time often forced me to give up running because of the few hours of daylight all devoted to various work commitments. Introducing the evening “session” was a breakthrough to which was added a dash of charm in reclaiming empty streets, raped only a moment before by the daily hustle and bustle.
This small achievement was followed by an immediate renunciation.
When I was assigned to substitute teach at an adult night school in Sassuolo this year, I immediately thought that evening training would be just a memory.
Driving home after a day’s work, I pass runners in fluorescent outfits cutting through the night and feel a little nostalgic. There is so much desire to join them, to shove myself into that last daily act where running becomes a kind of washing machine of the day that was, but my training clock has shifted to the morning.
Even the idea of accepting the night school assignment was not at all easy, but you know, the precariat is not a picky fence. I still had the fond memories in my head of last year’s classes, first and second graders who could make every day an adventure and make me feel like a reference point, and I found myself forced to reset everything and prepare for adult classes in the pursuit of middle school graduation.
The first day was like a slap in the face.
Returning home, I hoped to find an email from any school that would allow me to give up that substitute teaching and teach somewhere else. Nothing, I had to stay there. A forgotten wing of a middle school that graciously grants us a couple of classrooms in the evenings, a closet passed off as a teacher’s lounge complete with an exposed crack running karst along the walls, slate blackboards one step away from surrender, and the absence of teaching materials on which to prepare a lesson.
I thought that could only be punishment.
Then came the time to get my hands dirty, to get to know the students in front of me.
Everything changed there.
Adult evening classes are almost exclusively attended by foreign students who have recently arrived in Italy with a wide variety of needs: opening a VAT number, citizenship, entering a competition, improving language, gaining a new experience, enriching themselves, setting a goal. One common thread holds these stories together and that is willpower.
I found myself greeting students who had lime marks on their hands, or their workman’s overalls still on because you had gone into overtime and there was no time to stop by the house, take a shower and go back to school. When there is the last hour of class, the one that runs from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., I notice that occasionally a few yawns escape or their eyes narrow more than usual as they try to look at what I have written on the blackboard, yet for them, school attendance is vital. Happiness for taking a step forward is the same as for kids.
There are days when I am the youngest one in the courtroom.
In one month as a substitute teacher in the evening class, I went around the world a bit by being in only two classes. My students come from: Morocco, Cuba, Syria, Nigeria, Burkina-Faso, Ukraine, Tunisia, Brazil, Moldova, Portugal, Dominican Republic, Greece, Pakistan, France, Ghana, Kenya, Guinea and … Italy. I teach literature and understand more and more every day how vital it is to know a language, I have learned some Arabic words, I have found myself improving my English precisely because of the need to find a shared territory when one cannot communicate well, I have a totally different and enriched perception of the world and practical life than before.
But there is one fact that most of all is making my experience at the evening show truly enlightening. When I finish lecturing, students leave the classroom and before saying goodbye to me they say, “Thank you, teacher.” Thank you. Teaching in the mornings, I have not heard that word so often, and I also think I very rarely said it as a student to my professors.
Schooling in Italy is a right, and it must always be so. The problem is that our culture tends to cloak vested rights in things we too often take for granted. It may sound strange, but to rub our privileged status in our faces has to come from someone from the outside who perhaps saw school only as a mirage, as a ghetto for the rich or as something unnecessary since some times the real urgency is not to study, but to organize for a living.
All of the stories I am crossing paths with at the serale share a place of arrival and a sense of gratitude.
I don’t run anymore in the evenings; I’m too busy running around the world in the evenings.
Andrea Martina
(Main image credits: leszekglasner on DepositPhotos.com)