In the last months in our school there was an English assistant: Agostino. After the idea of Ms Rappo we decided to interview him.
Pietro Grosselle: Hello Agostino, make a short presentation of yourself.
Agostino Pizzolato: Hello Pietro. My name is Agostino, I’m from Vancouver, in Canada. I’m an university student there: I study History as main subject, but I also study Italian. I’m probably going to do other two years or more.
P: What will you bring back home from this experience?
A: Probably I’ll bring home a sense that I’m doing what I’d like to do. This has been a chance to try out on teaching, try out being in a classroom and I’ve enjoyed it quite a lot. It’s also been a chance for me to see more history. In Canada we don’t have the kind of history that you have here.
P: What are you hoping to leave us?
A: What I hope to leave behind is basically a friendly face. The most wonderful thing for me of being here has been getting to know people in Este and at school and getting to know my host family. So what I hope to leave behind is the relationships that I was been able to form, the friendships that I made here.
P: Did you feel welcomed in Italy?
A: At first no, it took me a little while to get used to be in a classroom, also because it was my first time teaching, but after a couple of lessons I did feel at home, and also enjoy being in class, teaching and working with the students.
P: How were the relationship with all the people in your period here in Italy?
A: I think the relationships have been very good. The students have been very friendly and it seems like everybody knows who I am. Everybody in the time have been very friendly, generous and welcoming.
P: Are there important differences between the Italian and the Canadian school systems?
A: The most obvious is that in Canada we don’t specialize at this age and level school, we begin to specialize into certain programme when we get university usually. But also in Canadian’s high schools we change classrooms all the time, we don’t have a set class and a set group of students that we belong to in the same way as you do here.
P: : Was it more difficult learning Italian or teaching at people that you don’t know?
A: It depends, some classes were a lot of fun but some of them were more difficult, sometimes the students weren’t really talkative. But I think that learning Italian has been much harder.
P: Would you like to come back in Italy other times? And if yes, what do you want to do in this future experience that you haven’t had the chance to accomplish until now?
A: I do hope to come back to Italy after I finish my university degree and what I hope to do is possibly to study in university here, to do some more advances to studies in History but I would also love to come here to learn Italian better.
P: How do you think yourself in five years?
A: In five years I would like to be working towards becoming a professor.
P: You participated in some events like festival of languages. What do you think about this kind of event here in our school?
A: I think it was wonderful, I was very impressed by the students. Especially by how much you guys know about the languages that you are studying, about the books that you’re studying. It was fun.
P: What do you miss the most of Canada?
A: I definitely miss the mountains and the forests, I spent so much time talking to different classes about how we like to hike in Canada and camp in Canada.
P: And you finished in a foggy land.
A: Yes, exactly. I can’t wait to go home and climb a mountain.
P: The most important question now. What is your favourite Italian food?
A: I said this to a couple of classes. My favourite Italian food is “Cotechino and Polenta”.
P: Ok, really good. Do you want to say us something else?
A: Yeah, I would like to thank everybody at the school honestly from my heart, for welcoming me into your classrooms, into the school itself. It has been a wonderful experience. And it has been a pleasure to get to know everybody, to see you in the hall, to see you walking around the streets in Este, it has been a pleasure for me to be a part of this experience.
P: Thank you really so much for this interview and for all you did in this school and for this school in this period here.
A big “Thank you” is for Agostino that decided to do this interview, but also a lot of thanks to Ms Rappo for the idea and an enormous “thank you” for Ms Govorcin that prepared the questions.
Here the photo of the official greeting:
Pietro Grosselle 4BSA