Drawing by Giulia Scimè, 5th grade, Pistelli Elementary School, Rome
That year I would have a new three-year cycle, a small class of only twenty students—because there was a girl with a disability. What kind of disability? I asked the principal of the language liceo in Rome where I taught. It was 2007.
"Discordant personality is what's written on her file. A difficult girl, with histrionic traits, sometimes aggressive, she shouts… She has support for eight hours."
"What does 'discordant personality' mean? The world is full of 'discordant' personalities, and so is this school, don't you think?"
"Professor, what can I tell you? I can assure you Francesca is intelligent. She's been promoted every year. She has trouble relating to her classmates. Sometimes she leaves the classroom and it's hard to find her—this is an old building, and she usually goes down to the basement. The custodians find her after a while in the storeroom with the maps, or in the closet where we keep the brooms… We've been careful to remove anything dangerous. We keep the chemistry lab locked. But Francesca isn't a danger to herself or anyone else… I know she's stubborn. Sometimes she refuses to follow lessons. She has intense dislikes or attachments to different teachers. She has these strange moments when she runs out of class, sometimes shouts or starts singing."
"We'll see," I replied. "Let me find out more first."
I consulted the members of the GLH, made an appointment with the ASL doctor who was treating the sixteen-year-old, spoke with her support teacher from the previous two years. I wanted to meet her parents.
None of these conversations helped me understand what Francesca's concrete psychological disability actually was. Or how to prepare a proper educational plan. For her parents, she "had a bad temper." For her support teacher, she was "crazy." For the doctor—after much hedging—"a discordant personality."
On the first day, I walked in and introduced myself. "I'll be your Italian and History teacher. Now I want to learn your names." We spent an hour getting to know one another, talking about the curriculum. Francesca sat alone at the front desk. She was a tall, solidly built girl with lots of reddish hair, and she watched me carefully, deciding whether she liked me. She asked if I was married, if I had children. I knew I'd passed her test when she gave me a brilliant smile. And so began a journey that would last three years and continue beyond.
I could calm her down by sitting beside her desk. She would smile, and that physical contact would soothe her.
Over time, I learned to navigate Francesca's "strangeness." On one hand, I wanted to understand her condition better. On the other, I didn't want to medicalize our relationship. I drew on everything I'd absorbed from my training in teaching methods—at the Salesian University and various courses on psychic disabilities at Gemelli Clinic. I drew on my passion for the subjects I taught. In a word, I accepted the challenge. Even in her incongruities, Francesca's interventions and observations made a kind of sense that I tried to grasp. More than understanding, I needed—I had—to feel.
Instead of trying to bring her to me, I tried to enter her way of thinking. She was very good at drawing. She had a remarkable knowledge of music and art. She spoke two foreign languages fluently. These were strengths I could build on.
There were difficult moments. I had to manage nineteen other students. I couldn't give in too much to her outbursts. When she'd hurl a desk across the room, interrupting the lesson because she demanded my total, immediate attention, I'd decide on the spot—whether to ignore her and let her shout until she was hoarse, or to stop what I was saying and "bring her in" with a question, the right word, a line from a sonnet, an episode from the American Revolution.
I could calm her down by sitting beside her desk. She would reach out and touch a scarf, a shawl, a necklace I was wearing. I'd keep teaching. She'd smile. That physical contact would soothe her.
She talked to herself in front of the window glass. I never asked her who she was talking to.
She grasped the beauty of a Tasso line at once and could connect it to another madrigal. She preferred the Baroque to the Renaissance—perhaps it suited her better—and especially the sonnets of Ciro da Pers. With Leopardi, she preferred the Operette Morali to the lyrics. Once, instead of the essay I'd assigned on the "Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander," she did a drawing. An enormous woman, Botero-style, with a mass of curly hair covering her down to the ground, and a tiny man in a corner of the poster. Small and on his knees, defeated, frightened, helpless. I graded that work. It wasn't a written essay, but the law speaks of "compositions written in class."
It was a composition. It was written in class.
We made it through three years like that, all the way to her final exams. She took her first school trip with me—before then, no one had wanted the responsibility. We went to Prague. I accepted, perhaps recklessly, to be her personal companion. It was an exhausting experience from the moment we got on the plane. We had to take taxis back to the hotel more than once to let her crises subside. But we managed.
Francesca graduated from Lumsa University. She continues to take antipsychotic medication. Thank God her family is financially stable. Now she's a difficult young woman. But she keeps going. Day by day. What will become of her? Who can say? But we've traveled a stretch of road together.
