Verbalized: Life + Food + Travel

• Personal
• Food
• Travel

In the classroom once again

They say that old habits die hard, and I say that there seems to be some truth in that adage after all. These are the facts: Over three years after graduating from university and leaving the academic life behind, there’s still something about walking into a classroom that transforms me into a tense, nervous version of myself. There’s still that tendency to constantly define new techniques of procrastination and then regret doing so, to feel like the ground is opening up underneath me if I get an answer wrong, and to sit in mortal fear that I might be called on at any moment, that I might have to actually talk, unprepared, in front of all those other people.

A few months ago, I decided that I was going to learn to speak Italian. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure why I was so wrapped up in the idea of mastering this particular language, future travel practicalities aside, although I told myself that it was the language of food and romance – of pasta, espresso, amore, la dolce vita – and therefore it was a language that I should acquire. After all, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food and also about the noticeable lack of romance in my life, so a language that managed to intertwine these things seemed to be the logical choice. So I picked up an old, used textbook – the first few chapters were full of doodled swirls and flourishes, including a cluster of hearts surrounding a photo of Michelangelo’s very naked David statue – and threw myself headfirst into it.

Characteristically, I’m one of those people who runs spectacularly hot and then icy cold on a new undertaking. I have a history of picking some activity at random (childhood obsessions have included horses, archeology, figure skating and Nancy Drew-esque detective work, although not necessarily in that order) and pursuing it with white-hot intensity and wild abandon for an indeterminate length of time before suddenly losing interest and walking away. Given this tendency, I fully expected that in a few short weeks I’d be reaching for a novel instead of the textbook or picking some other relatively obscure cultural pursuit to fling myself into.

But a few weeks later, I had yet to give it up. I was propping the textbook up next to my plate at dinner (page 65 is splattered with tomato sauce, page 80 may have had an encounter with some risotto), silently reciting lists of verb conjugations while pounding away on the treadmill, and deciphering cooking blogs from Italy as a form of additional practice. Some old habits, at least, do die with time: This was not a pursuit I was about to abandon.

And then I decided to enrol in a beginner’s Italian class, and on the evening of the first class, two things happened. The first thing was that I fell even more in love with the Italian language. There’s something intoxicating about hearing someone speak it out loud, something that textbooks and blogs alone can’t even begin to convey. But the second thing, the thing that brings me back to my original point about old habits dying hard, was that stepping through the doorway of that classroom suddenly brought a tidal wave of feelings rushing over me, old academic anxieties and classroom fears that I thought I’d walked away from when I walked across the stage at my university graduation.

There I was in a classroom that I had brought myself into on an entirely voluntary basis, with no exams looming in the future, no success riding on my understanding of the material, no prerequisites and no required outcome other than leaving each day with a slightly tighter grasp on Italian’s slippery grammar and tenses than I had when I walked in. And there I was, sitting in the front row and then regretting it, feeling my palms grow sweaty and my fingers starting to slide down my pen at the thought of speaking in class; of feeling twenty pairs of eyes fixed on the back of my head as I pondered the proper conjugations of essere and avere. To be, and to have. I am still irrationally terrified of getting things wrong, embarrassing myself and messing up in front of others, but I have a certain degree of confidence that this is something I need to do. And I’m enjoying the class, really, despite the nerves. One month in, I still freeze up when it’s my turn to give an answer, but then I relax a little bit, enjoy the feeling of the Italian words as I say them, relax a little bit more and then tell myself that it’s okay, we’re all here because we know nothing and want to come away with something.