Summer Camp

It’s during the final leg of my train journey that things begin to get surreal. I’m crammed against the window by the bulk of my backpack on the seat next to me. Eyes snatching at every blurred villa whisked past. I’m not nervous, but my brain feels sluggish after a week of meandering around in the sun. Then I catch a glimpse of blue through the trees, soon followed by another. Lake Maggiore is just as beautiful as it is in the pictures, and this wakes me up a bit.

The train pulls in at Verbania station, a town I didn’t know existed a month ago. I’d originally planned to spend the summer in Italy teaching for a different company, but by chance I’d spotted an advert for this job, which seemed better in every way. It’s a year-long position, but before they were willing to offer that to me, they wanted to see me in action for a week of Summer Camp. But there was a clash: if I wanted the chance to have my ideal job, it would mean giving up the one I’d already signed up to. In the end it was a choice between 3 months of unremarkable work, or a shot at my dream job, and I chose the latter. To be frank I made the decision instantly, but I still talked it through in detail with my Mum, pretending I was weighing up the pros and cons of each. Sorry Mum.

Of course, reckless and impulsive decisions are great so long as everything works out. I knew that if I messed up this week and came home with my tail between my legs, I’d feel like a pillock. An unemployed, sunburnt pillock. So it was important to get this right.

Meeting me at the station was Fabrizio, who I’d skyped a few times during the interview process. On the other end of a poor internet connection he’d seemed somewhat uncharacteristic for an Italian: reserved, softly spoken, and he didn’t shout MAMMA MIA even once. But in person he was charming and friendly, and was happy to answer the hundreds of questions I had. Yes, the summer camp was intended to be more focused on fun than language learning. No, I wasn’t expected to know Italian. Yes, this was a small school, with less than ten full time staff. This was what I’d hoped for: the sheer scale of everything in China had been overwhelming at times, and I wanted more of a sense of community.

I’d also wanted a shower before we began, but Fabrizio plonked my rucksack in the back seat and announced we were heading straight to the school to meet everyone and get started. Verbania unfolded itself from the verdant hillsides, glamorous and touristic but provincial and homely as well. We parked right next to the central square and walked into a courtyard, where a small union jack announced the entrance.

Schools are instantly recognizable for their unique combination of squeaky-cleanness and chaotic wall displays. But before I had time to look around I was met by a series of ciaos from a series of new colleagues.

Carmen is the receptionist but she’s also a doctor of marine biology; she speaks with the intense verbosity of someone who’s learned English through academic textbooks. Filippo looks like a chic young teacher before someone tells me he’s actually only 17 and here for work experience. Pat is the British teacher I’ll be replacing if things go well. He tells me he’s actually from Surrey too, but since I’ve never heard of his town, I just smile and say oh yeah in a progressively quieter voice.

Finally I meet Holly: Fabrizio’s girlfriend and the daughter of the school’s Director. After about thirty seconds of conversation I begin to realise that she’s the one in charge around here. She’s just as warm and welcoming as everyone else, but certain people have a knack for guiding conversations in the direction they’d like, and she’s very much one of them. My attempts at small talk, which has never been a skill for me, are subtly squashed in favour of a detailed briefing on the week ahead.

“Holly’s actually my Mum’s name.”

“Oh, how nice! So you’ll need to come up with a theme for your lessons…”

Our crew for the summer camp will be a conglomeration of current teachers, ex-teachers returning for the week, family members, and a collection of local teenagers who are helping out in return for a good write-up for their University applications. Lastly there’s me and another British teacher called Louise, who at this point I assume is my competitor for the new role. Fortunately she won’t arrive until late this evening, so I have a few hours’ head start, and plenty of time to poison her food before she arrives.

It turns out that I’ll have plenty of creative freedom during the camp, because I essentially have no limitations at all. The theme for the week is Scotland, but my classroom needs a theme too, and this can be explicitly Scottish or not Scottish at all. It’s my choice. I’ll need to decorate it myself, but how I do that is my choice. My lessons can be on anything at all, as long as they’re engaging and involve some English learning. It’s all my choice. It felt ironic to have so much freedom: after the authoritarian lesson structures of China it was what I desperately wanted, but this was a bit unprecedented, and a bit overwhelming.

I left in a bit of a daze. It wasn’t necessarily a bad first impression, but I hate meeting people all at once, and I didn’t feel like I’d displayed the “creativity and insight” that my CV boasts about.

Fortunately the day got a lot better from there. Fabrizio explained that there wasn’t space in the flat where the teachers normally live, so I’d be staying in their old family home up on the hill. There wasn’t any Wifi, but the view was apparently quite nice.

Well, that was an understatement:

It’s been nearly two weeks and I still can’t stop looking at it. It’s distracting me still as I try to write this. It’s the most beautiful place I have ever lived, and even if this had been an awful experience, it would’ve still been worth it for living in this house.

Fabrizio shows me where the food is, and then headed off. I made some pasta and pesto, and sat on the balcony watching the sun set over the mountains, content and unaware of the mosquitos savaging my body.

It’s late by the time Louise arrives. Louise is Welsh and says wow a lot, and we get on easily. It turns out she actually applied for a different position to me, so we’re not competitors after all. I slip the poison back into my bag, relieved but somewhat disappointed.

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The next few days fly by in a haze of flustered fun. After quite a lot of dithering, I decided upon a vague fantasy/monsters theme for my lessons, because a) fantasy is awesome, and b) I feel capable of designing a fantasy-themed classroom, having spent my childhood doodling maps and monsters into the corners of lesson planners. This part of the preparation was actually a joy: the school have enormous rolls of paper and weapons-grade permanent markers, so I draw up a map big enough to stretch from the floor to the ceiling, and cut out giant monster footprints.

By the Saturday before camp starts, my classroom is looking pretty damn good, and I’m proud of myself. Then I realise I haven’t planned any lessons, and spend the Sunday frantically scrabbling together half-remembered exercises and a few of the arty lesson ideas I never got the chance to try out in previous jobs. Louise has worked summer camps before and says that songs and chants always go down well, but as anyone who knows me will attest, song and dance is not exactly my forte.

Also during these last few days, a few of the returning teachers join the gang. Helena is half-German, half-English. She lives in Milan and her lessons will be about fashion. The image you have in your head is essentially right. Liam’s reputation precedes him: sporting long dark hair, sideburns and sunglasses at all times, and I mean all times, of the day, he’s taking a week off from his wild lifestyle as a DJ in Milan to teach the kids some music lessons. Finally there’s Sue, who set up Verbania school when she moved to Italy decades ago. Sue is just wonderful. She’s British originally, but has now lived and taught in Italy for so long that her normal inside-voice sounds like a gattling-gun. Sue’s lessons will be for the youngest kids, and focused on British activities such as making tea. This comes as a relief, because I’ve been wondering why I keep hearing someone scream I’M A LITTLE TEAPOT, TEAPOT, TEAPOT through the corridors for some time now.

All in all they’re a fantastic team, and it felt great to be a part of it. We meet on Sunday evening and decide that everything is ready, and the coming week will be absolutely fine as long as everything goes to plan. The only issue is that the plan is exceptionally complex, and it does have a habit of changing drastically every hour or so. The school are obviously keen to make our lessons more than just lessons, but especially for us newbies, it’s a lot to remember.

Each of us has a castle (made out of cardboard), and in that castle is a box, and in the box is our register for the day and a series of badges, which we need to write the kids’ names on and distribute, making sure we collect them in at the end of the day. We also have a small pile of fake British money which we can give out as rewards, which can be spent at a special tuck shop in the main hall. We also need to give out Priority Lunch Passes, VIP area passes, and special badges to the two most responsible members of our class. While this was a lot for us teachers to take in, for Holly and Fabrizio it meant staying up into the small hours of the night, every night, getting all of this ready. Remember, kids: teachers are mad.

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On Monday morning we watch the kids file into the main hall. There are 6 classes, each of about 16 students. Except since we’re now in Scotland, the main hall is actually called Edinburgh, and the classes are now clans. Each of the main teachers are assigned a clan: we’ll be teaching this clan more than any other. My clan are Yellow Clan, mostly aged around eight or nine. On the register I can see they were all born in 2011 or 2012, which is weird because that was only a couple of years ago.

As the students are filing into the main hall, Holly comes over and points out the name Roberto.

“Be careful with Roberto. I love him, but he can be a handful sometimes. He seems to like male teachers, which is why I’ve put him with you.”

This sounds good to me. One advantage of looking fairly young is that sometimes some of the louder students will see you as more of an older brother than an authority figure.

“Ok. Which one is Roberto?”

“He’s the one on the back bench, with the black hat.”

I cast my eyes for a black hat, and there I spot him, and no joke, he is giving one student a headlock while kicking another.

“Right. Roberto.” I make a little mark next to his name.

After this I lead my clan into my classroom. A moment of quiet joy as they gawp at the decorations.

They take their seats, and I start by throwing one of them a soft ball.

“What’s your name?”

“Matteo.”

“How are you?”

Silence.

“How are you? Good, bad, happy, sad?”

More silence. Blank stares, not just from Matteo but from the whole class.

They essentially know no English at all. I can almost visualize my lesson plans crumbling to dust.

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Having to dial back my lessons to something really quite basic wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. It’s a lot easier than finding yourself confronted with a class who are miles better than you expected. But it was still frustrating, and their behaviour didn’t help.

On the plus side, they liked me. They laughed at my stupid actions, they enjoyed my games. But on the downside, this didn’t mean they listened to me. At all. It soon became obvious that Roberto wasn’t the only nutcase, and what’s more, he wasn’t even the worst of them. One of them was big enough to take me in a fight, and occasionally looked like he was considering it. But I quickly discovered that as long as they were engaged in something, they actually worked pretty well. The only issue was that if one of them was distracted for one goddamnmotherfucking second, the fists were out, the middle fingers were raised, worksheets got shredded and all hell broke loose.

So I decided we were going to do arts and crafts all week. Maybe they weren’t ever going to perform the mini play I’d written for them, but at least they’d have some cool monster designs to show off to their parents on Friday. Whatever happened, I promised myself, at least we wouldn’t have to do a dance.

I was generally blessed by the fact that none of the other teachers saw what happened in my classroom. I realise that that sentence sounds very ominous, but what I mean is that everyone else saw me being surrounded by their adoring faces during break and lunchtime, when we were free to mess around and have fun. They didn’t see me shout myself hoarse trying to get them to sit down and do some work in the classroom.

The one exception to this was the day that we had to design our boxes. Holly had managed to find a hundred or so shoeboxes, which were perfect to keep all of their work in. But since they looked a bit bland and bare, we thought we’d spend an afternoon with all 90 students, painting and decorating them.

We’d laid out big mats which would stop the paint getting all over the floor. Every other class sat down in a neat circle to begin, except of course for the boys of Yellow Clan, who saw this as a fantastic opportunity for a bundle. I whisked away a bottle of paint seconds before it was crushed by someone’s butt, and motioned at the other classes, politely watching on.

Eventually I got them sat down, not in a circle but more of a drunk figure-of-eight, and it was time to paint. I got out the first bottle, but nothing was coming out. I figured it might have a seal like your average ketchup bottle, so I removed the lid and tentatively peered inside. When the paint exploded, volcano-style, out of the bottle, it must’ve missed my face by inches. A big clump flew, uncannily comedic, over my head and splashed onto my black jeans, splattering the nearest few shoeboxes too. The kids gave me a standing ovation, and Roberto grabbed a bottle to try it out himself.

Once I’d got myself cleaned up in the bathroom, I headed back to see how they were getting on. They were, to be fair, all painting. I just wish they’d been painting their boxes with paintbrushes, instead of painting each other’s faces with their hands.

I looked over at Helena and Pat helping their angelic children put the finishing touches on their late neo-Romantic masterpieces. I looked at my own, older children giving each other fluorescent yellow moustaches. It was one of those moments where I just didn’t feel cut out to be a teacher. Fortunately Holly, eerily reminiscent of The Terminator, marched over to the students and demanded they go outside to wash. They did, they washed, then they came back inside and started all over again.

Later that evening, Holly said “Ben, I feel like you’ve got the most challenging class.” I nodded serenely.

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The end of the week drew near, and I began to seriously worry about my end-of-week show. This had been branded by the school as not merely a show, but an EXPO: parents would be given a guided tour around the school, stopping into several classrooms to see what their children had been up to. If this went well, then I would have shown that I could produce the goods even with a boisterous class. If it went badly, then I could potentially lose a year-long job. Added to the difficulties of keeping them in control, I had to redesign the whole thing at a much more simple level. And around Thursday, I started losing my voice.

I hate losing my voice. When you’re a teacher that looks like a slightly melted fifteen-year-old, you need to cling to any vestige of authority you have. I have a loud, deep voice that has been described in the past as “actually quite nice”, and it helps immeasurably in the classroom. Except for when it goes.

On Thursday we went out into Verbania for a field trip, which was a nice break from the school. While there we did some Scottish-style Highland games, and I was in charge of the caber toss (burly Scottish men basically pick up tree trunks and flip them over). We had a great time, and even the nuns joined in:

But by the end of a baking hot afternoon shouting THREE — TWO — ONE — TOSS!!, my voice sounded like static on the radio. What was worse, I’d been explicitly instructed to write a song for the expo. So on Thursday evening I went home in a foul mood and wrote the cheeriest, happiest jingle I could think of. It was called “What Shall We Do With The Loch Ness Monster,” and no, it’s not on Spotify.

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On Friday the stress and exhaustion levels were both running high. I found myself getting increasingly stressed until about lunchtime, when I reached a strange kind of Zen point in which I at least knew that there wasn’t anything more I could do. My kids had their monster designs, and they’d taken fairly well to my song. Although admittedly because I could only croak the lyrics, they all sang it as though they, too, had a ravaged voice box.

I hadn’t planned to add anything more into the final show, but Holly came into my classroom that morning with other ideas. I’m always up for other ideas, but these other ideas involved dancing to “The Monster Mash” in front of forty parents, and as expressed earlier, I’m really, really not one for dancing.

“I’m sorry Holly, I just don’t think we have enough time to learn a dance before the show this evening.”

“Oh, you don’t need to. I already taught them it this morning.”

And I could only stand and watch as Holly plugged in a speaker, found a monster mash YouTube video, and performed an immaculately choreographed Monster Mash dance along with all of my kids. Of course, they didn’t try and attack her. They were brilliant: it was perfect. Holly finished up, gave them a round of applause, and turned to me, glowing with pride, sort of like the World’s Most Committed Teacher but also sort of like a dictator during a rally.

I couldn’t do anything but nod my approval. And that afternoon, I did the Monster Mash Dance with my kids three times through.

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It had gone pretty well. The parents were glowing with pride, and my voice had just about held up to the end. My show definitely didn’t have the glitz and the glamour of Helena’s fashion show, or Liam’s makeshift rock concert:

But it had been a solid attempt which I’d poured my heart and soul into. I was proud of my Yellow clan, especially the ones who hadn’t tried to kill the others. As I gave them all a high five and played We Will Rock You out of the speakers, I reflected on the fact that despite feeling completely exhausted, the past week had more or less flown by.

Having not taught for almost a year, I was worried about getting back into the groove of teaching. Not least because my last few months of teaching, during the grips of a chronic illness I didn’t understand, were quite traumatic. Teaching isn’t something that’s effortless for me, and it takes a lot to psyche an introvert up for that kind of intensity. But in the end, the mayhem and the madness didn’t give me time to stress and overanalyse, because there was always someone in a headlock to see to. So it worked out alright.

And guess what? I got the bloody job. Italy, I’ll see you in September.