English at High School

At this point I started High School. Again, I had to face other classmates, other subjects and other teachers. The first English class was a shock: the teacher spoke English during the WHOLE class and I couldn’t grasp almost anything. I was terrified: I’ve always been quite good at English, and now I couldn’t even follow the first class?!? Even though it was hard and somehow frustrating, I liked the teacher: she made me understand that learning a language is not only learning its grammar and vocabulary, it is also about speaking and listening. When I was finally convinced that I would attend the best English classes ever, the teacher was sent away and was replaced by an old-fashion one: again, we went back to classes in Italian that addressed mainly grammar: we were supposed to memorize a thousand rules and exceptions and study for the test.

But the few classes I had with the “innovative teacher” made me want to “learn English properly”, and, as soon as I found out that the school was offering “conversation classes” in the afternoon, I enrolled. Before starting classes we had to take an interview so that they could put us in the right level. The problem was: how could I take a fine interview if I had never spoken English in my whole life? All the faults of that “grammar focused” teaching revealed themselves: I had a terrible interview, I had to go to a very basic level, and there, in spite of the teacher being a very nice and patient Englishman, I had quite an awful time: my classmates didn’t know absolutely anything of English and didn’t want to make any effort to speak the language.
Still, I kept going to these classes during a year, but at the very end I just dropped the course and never took my certificate. I’m not the kind of person that gives up things like that, but I think I did that just because the climate in the classroom was not a good one.