Arrivederci Roma!

Last Friday we had a farewell party to say goodbye to our American students. A beautiful room with the architects’ projects and pictures taken in Rome was arranged, and a great buffet was prepared. Students brought some CDs and danced and laughed all the night… it was great to see them having so much fun! After months of hard work and exams, finally American guys were having fun and some relaxing time.

It was new to me seeing them in such a different light, in a very different role from that of students. Perhaps it must have been the same for them, not to seeing me as their teacher anymore. Everybody talked to me and invited me to drink something with them. They asked me about my studies and my experience at the Pantheon Institute. They were very different from the shy and reserved guys I had been seeing during classes in the last months. I was feeling closer to them. I also spent some time watching the architect’s projects. They were amazing. A sort of personal view on Rome, partly imagined and partly seen through their experience. In that moment I felt I was really meeting my students, and realized how contradictory was to call a fete ‘farewell party’. A moment in which everybody should feel happy and light-hearted, hides the sadness of a goodbye. Goodbye to Rome, to the teachers who have being supporting them for four months, to their Italian lifestyle, to the friends they’ve been knowing at the Institute. And that’s why they were having so much fun, and dancing and singing out loud… so as not to feel sad, because it was their ‘last night’.

I will miss my students. Well, they’re not my students anymore, so… let’s say friends. Friends because we lived together a new experience, in which both sides have been trying to learn and improve themselves. In which everybody has simply grown. And I guess I have grown and learnt with them, not only about teaching but about life. I always say that studying languages opens your mind. But meeting beautiful people opens your heart.

Thanks guys.
Alessia