To follow up my vendemia post, I wanted to share a few photos, courtesy of my daughter's teacher. This first shot shows the kids picking the grapes from the stems, and dropping them into the bucket.

And now the fun begins! Here's my daughter (that's her orange sleeve on the left) embracing two classmates as they stomp and squish and smush the grapes in their bucket.

Her teacher told me yesterday that the grape juice they mushed with their tootsies will be made into wine, and the kids will get to bring home a bottle at the end of the year. I love Italy.

Mommy, where does wine come from?

My 8-year-old daughter asked this question at dinner the other night. She wasn't satisfied with my answer (the grocery store), so my Italian husband filled her in on the wine-making process. He's not a wine expert, by any means. His wine I.Q. is average--for an Italian. Which is waaaaay above my wine I.Q.

The reason my daughter asked this question is because her 3rd grade teacher had planned a field trip to a local village where they'd be participating in a vendemia--a grape harvest. Our daughter informed us (with that What-kind-of-parents-are-you? look on her face) that every child in her class had attended a vendemia, except for her. I just hope no one calls Social Services.

So yesterday the class went and learned how wine is made. They cut the grapes from the vines, tossed them in big buckets, removed their shoes and socks, and started squishing. (My daughter reports that this was both icky and fun at the same time). After the last of the grape juice was washed off of their 8-year-old toes, they heaped the grape-y mess onto sieves, then tasted the grape juice that filtered through. My daughter isn't clear as to whether they actually drank the juice that their bare (and who knows how clean?) feet had touched. I kind of hope not.

The whole class filed off the field trip bus happy and tired, each child toting a bag of small, purple grapes that taste like sweet dessert wine. The teacher carried two bottles of wine (unopened) in her arms. After a day of wine-making with 25 third-graders, I suspect those bottles came in handy.

Are Italian children geniuses?

I'd always known the time would come when I wouldn't be able to help my kids with their homework--when they start taking courses like high school chemistry, for example. So you can imagine my surprise when my ignorance showed up early--this year, in fact. With my 2nd grader. Ouch.

I do speak Italian, although I certainly don't speak like a native. But some things had me stumped this year. In the page below, my daughter divided up sentences into the parts of speech: subject, predicate and "expansion." Maybe it's me admitting my ignorance on a public forum, but I've never heard the term expansion used as a part of a sentence. So when my daughter asked me to help her with her homework, my response was, "Huh?" My daughter looked at me as if to say: "Didn't you learn anything in second grade?"
Luckily, she had the following page in her notebook, explaining that an expansion is the where, when, how and what of the sentence. "Oh," I said, trying to redeem myself in my daughter's eyes. "The expansion is the object of the sentence." She just rolled those eyes and shook her head. "Expansion it is, then," I said.

Then they started diagramming sentences, and naming the function of each word. In the page below, my daughter has written: Una cantante canta, which means "A singer sings." She labeled the subject and predicate, then went on to note that:

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Una= indefinite article, feminine, singular (thank God we just have plain 'ol a or an)

cantante (singer)= common noun, feminine, singular (thank God--again--that all our nouns are androgynous)

canta (sings)= verb (later in the year she goes on to add labels like "third person, present tense")

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Come on, people--definite vs. indefinite articles in 2nd grade? I don't know about you, but I never did this kind of thing when I was seven.

But that's okay--I know my parts of speech as well as the next Italian mamma, and was able to help her with this homework assignment.

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Then came the nouns. Italian nouns that end with an "o" are masculine, and those that end with an "a" are feminine. Usually. But not always. And those exceptions are the ones that the teacher gives for homework, of course, sending me back to the dictionary time after time. By now, my daughter's wondering if I've ever been to school at all.

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Then they started learning about the different verb tenses--the next page shows present and future. Again, simple enough--I know these. What I don't know is this crazy past tense called passato remoto that they use for things that happened a looooong time ago. You see it a lot in stories, and it's totally different from the infinitive form of the verb. Northern Italians don't use it when they speak, so I rarely hear it. I know, I know....I should read more.

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And then you've got the subjunctive tense, as in: "If I were really fluent in Italian, I wouldn't have to keep running to the dictionary to help my second-grader with her homework." In that sentence, were is in the subjunctive. The only problem is that Italians use this tense for a gazillion other situations that we don't. For example, if I say "She is at home, " or "I think she is at home," I've used "is" in both cases. Not so in Italian. They use the subjunctive for the second sentence, because it expresses doubt. Just like I'm starting to doubt whether I sound half-way intelligent when I speak Italian, because I frequently forget to use the &$%/£* subjunctive tense.

Now, to cement my ignorance even further, I made the mistake of expressing my surprise when my daughter's teacher taught them to write in cursive at the end of 1st grade. When I was a teacher in the U.S., we introduced cursive in 3rd grade. Yup. 3rd grade.

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And writing in pen. When did you first write in pen at school? I seem to think it was middle school, if I remember correctly. Here they use a special pen with the ink on one end, and a white-out type tip on the other end for covering up mistakes. And they use this pen for math. Mercy.

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So then I get to thinking, why are Italian bambini learning all of this stuff so early? Are they geniuses? And then it hit me: There are no spelling tests in Italian schools.

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That's it!

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Italian is a phonetically regular language, so what'cha see is what'cha say. American kids have to slog through all of those word families and rules and phonics exercises so they can pass that spelling test every Friday.

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Whew! I felt better already. We're not so slow, after all. Italians may have their tricky verbs, but we've got to figure out the difference between threw and through, pair, pare and pear, and ate and eight.

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No wonder American kids don't write in pen.

Sing, sing a song...

On Saturday, we went to our second-grader's end-of-the-school-year show. The theme this year was songs sung in Triestino, the local dialect. Triestines have a love/hate relationship with their dialect--most of them think Triestino sounds uneducated, yet they find it difficult to speak in Italian with friends and family--the dialect just sounds friendlier, and it's indispensable when you're telling jokes (jokes in Italian just don't have the same delivery).

Triestines don't want their children to speak, read, or write the dialect in school, because it might interfere with their Italian. However, this time the school made an exception.

In this photo, you can see the signs made by the children with the titles of famous Triestine songs and drawings of landmarks--the tram, the lighthouse, the castle, and in the upper left hand corner, a cloud blowing the Bora, Trieste's famous gale-force wind.
(This is off-topic, but the photo below is to show you that the windows is this gym were all closed. And it must have been 1,000 degrees in there. But we wouldn't want a draft to sneak in and cool anyone off, now...would we?)

Okay, back to the dialect and singing...

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The children sang at least 10 Triestine songs that everyone in the audience knew--they aren't children's songs, necessarily--some recount a piece of Triestine history, some express an undying love for all things Triestine, and some are just meant to make you laugh.

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Here are a few choice lyrics that would never make the American elementary school show circuit:

1. Da un litro de quel bon= Give me another liter of that good wine.

2. E non la me vol più ben, la prega Dio che crepo, inveze stago ben!= She doesn't love me anymore, she prays that I'll die, but I'm feeling fine!

3. E mio marì xe bon, el xe tre volte bon, ma solo la domenica me onzi col baston= My husband is a good man--he only beats me on Sundays.

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That last one is an especially lovely sentiment, isn't it? (!)

On the historical end, there were songs that make fun of Austria (more specifically, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire that ruled Trieste for 500+ years), and songs that tell of Istrian cities that used to be part of Italy, and are now Croatian--a touchy subject for Italians who had to leave their Istrian homes after the war.

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And interesting to me, there's a famous song about wanting to go to America, no matter type of transportation one might have to resort to--even if it's by skateboard, driving a hearse, or on the back of the horse belonging to your mother-in-law.

Considering there's an ocean between Italy and America, we can gather that whoever wrote that song was either geographically challenged, or really wanted to leave Italy.

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Each grade also performed a dance that represented one of the many cultures that has passed through Trieste's ports. For example, Greek sailors used to whip out their mandolins and dance on the docks. The photo below is my daughter's class performing a Hebrew dance--many Jews sought refuge in Trieste during World War II, including Albert Einstein.

By the time the last song was sung, the parents and grandparents were all clapping and grinning and singing along with gusto, and some were even dancing in the aisles. Even though they don't want the dialect to be taught in school, I could tell that hearing their children singing the old familiar songs in Triestino was music to their ears.

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That's always been one of the things I've loved about Italians--they'll take any excuse to dance and sing. I remember when I first came to Trieste in 1993, I'd go out with friends (American, Australian, and English), and it was always more fun when our Triestine friends joined us. We'd be in a bar with 100 people, and for whatever reason (wine being the most likely culprit), someone would start singing a Triestine song, and the whole bar would join in. I remember after a particularly raucous round of singing, our Triestine friends asked us to sing a song in English that we all knew.

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We were stumped.

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All we could come up with were TV show theme songs--The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, and the like.

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Oh, well.

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So my children will grow up singing about good wine and the story of a man named Brady...you just can't get more well-rounded than that...

One strike, and...the kids are home

Here's a photo of my daughter's school (the burnt-orange-colored building). When this photo was taken, students were inside--some walking the halls, some at their desks, some probably throwing the odd spitball or two. Teachers were teaching. And disciplining. And perhaps dodging spitballs.

But not today.

Today there's a scioppero. If you've lived in Italy, you're nodding your head right now saying, "Ah, another scioppero."

Scioppero means strike, and they are regular occurances here. Train workers go on strike. Nurses go on strike. Everyone and his brother goes on strike. And, of course, teachers go on strike.

Strikes are always announced ahead of time, both in the newpapers, on television and websites. So if you want to take the train to Rome on Monday, you check the Italian railway website Monday morning to make sure your train is still running. And if it's not? Well, then, you go to Rome on Tuesday. Pazienza (patience), as the Italians would say.

However, we did not realize that today was a teacher strike day until we got to school with the kids. Apparently, a notice had been posted in the school foyer, which we didn't see yesterday. This is perhaps due to the fact that the notice was tacked to a bulletin board along with 15,000 other notices for various summer programs.

But didn't we hear other parents talking about it? Before school? After school? In the bars? On the street? Italian children don't take school buses, so this means you must drop your kids off and pick them up every day--a chance to see and talk with other parents. So why didn't anyone tell us?

Frankly, because a strike just isn't big news here. It might be mentioned in casual conversation, as in: "I'll call you tomorrow and we'll go for coffee. Oh, wait, I can't go tomorrow--I'll be home with the kids--scioppero."

We weren't the only ones who missed the notice--5 other families showed up, read the notice, shrugged, and went home...kids in tow.

So now I have to cancel my writing plan for this morning...I'm sneaking in this blog post while my son naps and my daughters are having a snack. But at least I work from home. I feel for the parents who have to scramble to make other arrangements because they didn't see the strike coming. Actually, "other arrangements" = "take the kids to the grandparents' house" here in Italy, so I guess all's well that ends well.

What would Italy do if the mammas went on strike?

*edited to add:* One of my daughter's teachers lives nearby, and my daughter just came skipping through the door saying she'd been talking to her teacher who was working in her garden.

What? No picket lines? What kind of strike is this? The kind I'd like to go on, that's what kind.