European Field Trip!

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Prague

At 5:00am last Monday, 8 Pacioli teachers, 120 fifth-year students, Laura, and I rolled out of the school’s parking lot in three packed buses. 14 hours, six rest areas, and three countries later, we found ourselves in Prague, where we stayed until the early hours of Friday morning.


Sunset o'er a German McDonalds.
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The trip, though organized by the school, had no formal academic purpose. During the day we would sightsee, but the students weren’t responsible for any of the information they learned. Which meant that many of them spent the hours sightseeing either chatting with their friends or plugged into their IPods. At night, it became clear what the fieldtrip’s real scope was: hanging out.

Said hangout spots included:

1.) The hotel basement, where there was a small bar, billiards, foosball, and three bowling lanes.

2.) The main hotel bar, where there were a bunch of tables and a big screen TV (on which we watched many an hour of Champions League soccer).

3.) The hotel lobby, where there were couches, ashtrays, and an inexhaustible cloud of cigarette smoke. (The percentage of Italian teenagers that smoke is shockingly high. In my suburban public high school back in the States – maybe not the most representative of places, but the only reference point I have – no more than 5% of high school seniors smoked between classes at school. In Italy, I’d put that number above 50%... with the percentage of students that smoke socially even higher.)

4.) Hotel rooms. Many of the students would buy beer during the day to be used later on that night.

The fascinating thing about this whole process, for me, was that the teachers had no problems with any of these activities, and often went so far as to participate in them. Students and teachers could often be found drinking at the same table, or bumming cigarettes off each other, or bashing each other about soccer loyalties. The teachers had no problems hanging out in the presence of their students, and the students had no problems acting like fools in the presence of their teachers.

The lack of formality in these relationships is, I think, a beautiful thing. It would have been awesome in high school to have been able to share a beer with my English teacher, or watch a baseball game in a bar with my guidance counselor. And maybe, had my friends and I been used to seeing our teachers out on the weekends, we wouldn’t have done some of the often rather stupid things that we ended up doing. Although Italian students do drink, the general drinking culture is far less binge-oriented than it does back in the States. Yes, some Italian kids drink too much. And no, not all American kids like getting hammered. But the generalizations aren’t so far off.

At this point, were the drinking age in the States lower, I think the ensuing damage would outweigh any possible positivity. (See LOCO PARENTS: A CASE FOR THE OVERHAUL OF SOCIAL-HOST LIABILITY IN FLORIDA by Samuel Randall, for further thoughts.) Nonetheless, the experience made me reflect about about American drinking culture.

John McCardell’s mission aside…

Tuesday and Wednesday we spent seeing various old stuff in Prague, most of which was beautiful, but didn’t really compare to the old stuff I had seen in Rome in December. The one sight that did stand out for me was an ancient cemetery in the city’s Jewish Quarter. Here, there were graves from as far back as the 1400s.

The ancient cemetery in Prague's Jewish quarter.


Then on Thursday, we drove about an hour and a half outside Prague to Terezin, an old fortress/prison, which was used by the Gestapo as a concentration camp during World War II. For me it was sobering – but meaningful – finally to be able to see some of the things in person that I’ve read about, and seen movies about, so many times before.


Terezin.

As my mother informed me, pre-WWII Prague had a thriving Jewish community, but today, all you can find there are cemeteries and abandoned synagogues. A sad – but accurate – description of Judaism in the city today.


Cotton Eyed Giuseppe

Throughout the trip, several of the students had been begging the teachers to take them out to a dance club in Prague. The logistics with the buses and the teacher supervision ratios (one teacher to every 15 students) didn’t work out, though, so in an effort to make it up to the students, the teachers decided on Thursday night to bring a dance club, of sorts, to the hotel.

Expectations leading into the night were surprisingly high, but the infamous “hotel discoteca” ended up being nothing more than an empty banquet room and an IPod plugged into some low quality speakers. When I got there, the students were having a fairly miserable time, and many of them were getting ready to leave to go drink in their rooms. One of the teachers who had helped organize the event, seeing me, crossed the dance floor and pleaded with me to do my best to get the students to start dancing. For a moment – taking in the scene – I considered telling her that the situation was beyond salvation. But then I thought better of it. After all, was I not from Newton, Massachusetts? Had I not been to over 50 Bat and Bar Mitzvah parties over the course of my seventh and eighth grade years?

Snapping into action – and doing my best to remember everything that I’d learned from Siagel Productions – I did what any well-trained Bar Mitzvah party frequenter would do: I began to teach the nearest group of girls the Cotton Eyed Joe dance. Miraculously – they loved it. Intrigued, another group of girls came over to our side of the banquet hall. They too, it turned out, wanted to learn the dance. And so I taught it to them. And get this – they loved it too! Next, two of the teachers came over. Yes, teachers. 45 year olds, at that. They wanted to learn it. And then some of the guys. And then a bunch more of the girls. (The music, mind you, was always trashy European techno… but as long as there was a 4/4 beat, it worked fine.)

By the end of the hour, I had taught over 40 people how to dance the Cotton Eyed Joe. And although we were never able to get everybody doing it at the same time, at one point we had about 15 of us doing the dance together, perfectly in sync, as a group of 20 or so watched on. And it was, without exaggeration, the greatest teaching moment of my six months here in Italy.



When I got back to Crema on Friday evening, I found glorious spring weather awaiting me. Therefore, at this time I must leave you to head out on a jog around the city.


Sunset on the ride home.



Hopefully you’re all enjoying similarly glorious springtime weather back in the states. Until next time, be well,


Best,


Nate