Il Professore

My Italian teacher is so funny. But not that funny. Just the right amount of funny.

I’m fulfilling a lifelong dream to learn Italian. As we crawl along in Italian I, our engaging, playful and often humorous Professore makes learning fun. Laughter in the classroom is a good thing and an effective way to teach.

If he proceeded as a perpetual stand-up comedian, it would be too distracting. It would pull us too far off the subject, like when someone goes on and on trying to be funny. It can get old really fast.

But with regular and intermittent shots of humor, he causes us regular and intermittent shots of laughter. It continually wakes up our brain and prevents us from getting too tense about this humbling process of learning to confidently speak a foreign language.

He stressed how important it is to pronounce double consonants with double strength. For example penne paste spoken with only one lazy n comes out sounding like pene, which means….well, I’ll let you guess. It’s definitely not on the menu.

When discussing how friendly Italians in Italy are, he mentioned Rome as a great city. I countered with the reputation Rome has for robbing tourists; to which he retorted “but they’re friendly when they do it”.

He showed us an adorable animated video of Italian stereotypes, which was hilarious because of course stereotypes have to hold a portion of the truth to be so funny. The traffic clip sent me over the edge.

We read Snoppy cartoons in Italian, one portraying Snoppy dog having nightmares of cats, cats, and more cats: “Un gatto, un gatto, un gatto, mi fa impazzire.” (“It’s making me crazy.”)

He teaches us slang to make it less boring. “Che una frittata!” “What a mess!” And other more colorful sayings unsuitable for a blog about laughter.

When I handed him a check, he exclaimed “fagoli!” which means beans, i.e. food on his table.

When Jill declared I was not riccio, he began a running humorous dialogue about riccio the hedgehog, of which there are many in his native Ukraine. I will forever remember that riccio does not = rich.

He makes this language fun and makes the culture come alive with his humor.

As a bottom line he conducts the class with a perpetual smile and a relaxed manner. That in itself relaxes all of us. We only learn better if we’re relaxed. Our brains wake up more every time we laugh. And a fun class motivates us to stick with it and learn.

As Dr. Seuss said, “I like nonsense – it wakes up the brain.”

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