School to laugh 1

School to laugh 1
At school we laugh, and a lot. I report here a few anecdotes, coming from the present and the past, happened to me and my students. After all, this is good: we remember  better what we laugh about...

 · I was teaching in Florence, in a first grade. Literature in first grade is a very tiny thing: we study those vague data about communication (communication is between a sender and a recipient, it has as object a message, prepared in a particular code, etc. etc..), pretty unnecessary things that kids end up to forget at once. One day I was explaining, when I caught in the act two young men furiously chatting. At one point,  after my umpteenth reminder (something like: "Do you also want tea with cookies, to be more comfortable?") one of the two replied, with a large grin:
- You see, Professor, we are putting into practice the communication theory: I'm the sender, he is the recipient.What can one poor teacher answer to such a reply? No comment. And "no comment" was.
· Same class, oral test about History. I note that, about the Persians, the interviewed pupil showes a very vague idea about ancient geography, so I ask him: - Sorry, but, in your opinion, where is Persia?Ready answer: - In Africa!
· How do I explain the Divine Comedy? The readers of my blog, out of my school, will think, on the ground of the earnest studies published here, that my lessons should be very professor-like: in fact, they are often very down-to-earth (but very down to earth). Lesson about Inferno XV, the part dedicated to blasphemers and sodomites, who wander or get stuck in a desert, the "sandy soil", under the rain of fire, as in the Bible it happened to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a canto that always causes in a teacher a certain anxiety (how could Dante stick in here just his professor, Brunetto Latini? And - a thought that always surfaces in the antechamber of the brain of a Humanities teacher while explaining this canto - if, among my students, there were a new Dante? What circle of hell I'll get in???). Well, Dante, being alive, can not be burnt under the infernal rain: so, he walks with his guide Virgil on the bank of the Phlegethon river (the river of the local infernal circle, a river of boiling blood), in the shelter of the vapor cloud formed by the river. Who saw Frozen, will remember that the snowman Olaf gets around with his little personal cloud, to avoid to melt like an ice-cream: so, when I explain the geography of the hell (this year in 3M and 3O), I do not miss to point out that Dante ,walking on the embankment, owes his shelter to the "Olaf effect"...