EXPERTS

I guess this could have happened to anyone but, one year, explaining the unity in Christmas, I asked who were the Three Kings and a girl told me that they were Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia and Leticia. Because they are kings. I told them I was referring to those from the East, the Three Wise Men of Christmas, and she told me that his father said they live in the Kings Palace of Orient and the King goes out only at Christmas. I was speechless.

We had a class pet, a little hamster called Pon. When I arrived to school he was already there so they explained me that when he died, they bought another just like him because the children became very sad every time he died. It seemed to be a good idea but, hey, stranger things have happened.
One day Joaquín, a 5 years old child, came to school very sad and her mother warned me that his dog had died. From time to time he cried and told me that if Lala (his dog) had eaten the same as Pon the hamster she wouldn’t have died.
So I am not in favor of "reviving" the hamster, that means to deceive children and that's not good.
Here I leave my opinion.

I have been working as teacher for more than 40 years, but I could say that I have been a teacher all my life because when I was young I looked after my neighbors’ children for some coins. I did it by vocation, something that is disappearing. I’m retired now, and when I look back I think everything has deteriorated significantly because new generations have lost precisely what made me take care of my neighbors while my friends went to the park to hang out: the vocation.
Government employees have lost it: steady job, good pay, tedium, vacations, good timetable and above all the safety of having a secure job. Children will change, but the public teacher remains. In private education it’s different, working conditions are not as good and stability either. Deep down it doesn’t matter, they have lost their vocation.
As a professional in primary education, I reflect by telling my story. I remember my teacher Maruja who sang songs for us. The children nowadays will remember something called Sony, who plays the music in DVD. Technology can not replace us.
I'm not one of those who think that any past time was better, and I’m in favor of the logical evolution of society, but we lost the values along the way, values such as respect and admiration for teachers who have helped us to learn and become what we are today.

 Hello everyone, every year the same thing happens to me, we start on September the 1st, and we are told to program the 1st quarter. How I can program the 1st quarter if I still don’t know the children in the class?! They say: use the last year planning and adapt it to the new project... What project?!

I usually enjoy working in nursery schools: children are curious, funny and interesting. Once, during a meeting with the staff of a nursery school, we were discussing about hygienic procedures, and in particular about the role these procedures play in the acquisition of autonomy by children, as well as in the language, body and gender-difference knowledge development. We were discussing about the way children interpreter episodes that happens at home, how they tell that episodes at school…One of the member of the team told us– embarrassed and amused at once- the following episode. A 2 years old child just had a little surgery to its penis, that caused him pain for a little while. Now everything was ok – but for a little irritation to be treated with a specific pomade. The child was lying down on the changing table waiting she dried off his genitals after washing... To make shorter the wait, she was saying with a soft voice: “ you went red – now I dry you well and rub the pomade …”. He raised his head to see his penis and asked really worried: “ but…but.. is it still there?”. “Yes -she answered- it’s there, it’s there don’t worry, it is still there”

I lived a difficult situation at work last year because the colleague whom I worked with had a way to treat children which was totally different from mine.

There are two important events of my career.
The first event goes back to when I had around 22 years, during the beginning of the 70ies. I have been named for one year as a support teacher in a pre-primary school of Bologna, it was my first professional experience and I was lucky to enter a school where there were carried out didactic experimentations based on the teaching of Bruno Ciari, still today an important pedagogist.

In my career I had one experience which was really unpleasant. Around 5 or 6 years ago a girl of a class which had been assigned to me only two months before fell down while she was playing with a mate of the class.

My experience as mum has helped me much in my work with babies. I did not really have any difficult situation in my work with children. As an immigrant person, I had some difficulty with the Italian language, so it was very useful for me to see how to carry out a task rather than only speaking about it.