“Our ‘doing poorly’ students never come to school alone. An onion enters the classroom.”
A lucid and honest analysis of the world of school.
A smooth read, which won’t bore anyone: you can bet on it, readers, trust me. The book is divided into small chapters, as the title suggests, like small scenes of various situations, people, emotions encountered at school. An institution as ancient as it has been mistreated in recent years, and this is particularly true in the Western world, where school tends to become a battleground with no winners between students, teachers and parents. In fact, Pennac’s text fits perfectly into the French, Italian and Spanish school systems, because, leaving aside the different systems, the dynamics between the three categories listed above do not change.
The author’s voice manages to remain fun and lively. Note and mark the first two pages: you won’t be able not to finish the first chapter with laughter. The freshness of the text is comparable to what we had in class when after recess we opened the windows to let the air change, and we remained attentive to feel the breath of life giving new energy and removing the bad grades from the first part of the morning.
The writer’s attention is not generic, it is not a bird’s eye view of the internal dynamics of the school and yet, we assure you that you will all find yourself both as students and as teachers.
Pennac starts with himself: a terrible student in all his scholastic phases, he has a very dense history of failures in all subjects; Pennac understood nothing! Who has never happened to?
Yet there is something that we often forget to give importance to: the value of defeats, even incessant and repeated ones. It’s not true that you always have to win and come first, just as it’s not true that if you lose a thousand times you won’t be able to succeed. And here we see the amazed gaze of a Pennac who has now become a teacher who, after several years, meets his students who, even that little girl in eighth grade who says “My goodness, I was poor”, have become. We all become. Even those of “I’ll never get there, professor”.
This must be a universal message: from students to professors.
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Daniel Pennac, Diario di scuola, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2008
Original edition: Chagrin d’école, Gallimard, Paris, 2007