To sleep, to die, to sleep

I'm not too sure what's going on in the outside world anymore. Might be better off that way. Reading the news seems to prevent you from really finding out what's happening in the world, rather than giving any information. So I'm giving up the hope to responding to Radhika's last piece, and will simply narrate my Prospero's existence here in Duino.

This school is the tiniest microcosm. I spent the weekend running things for students, skiing with them, talking with them, eating with them, playing basketball with them, and finally, on Monday teaching them. We went off to a ski resort nearby, in Zoncolan, next to the Austrian border, and spent the day on the slopes. Skiing is usually quite a bourgeois activity, only for rich white middle class people. Our students don't have to pay anything, because the school gets them out for dirt cheap rates, and has its own ski gear. I suppose it's pretty bourgeois all the same, but there are students who can hardly afford a coffee in a local bar, who get to go and experience the mountain.

Being around students all the time is a strage experience. It means that I don't have a teacher-student relationship with them, so much as a sort of family link. When I go home, they are in the next room preparing food or studying. When I go off for my weekend, it's with students. It's exhausting in some ways, because it means keeping up a certain persona all the time. But it's fantastic as well. They're so full of energy, bright ideas and hopes that they really make every day different from the last.

I was talking with one of my English students who lives in my residence, about whether or not I would be here next year. It was very hard to explain why I am looking at alternatives, because it sounds like mere opportunism. It really choked me, to try to explain why I need to find work somewhere where I can have a life outside my school, without sounding as if I was slandering this place. But at the same time, it was very healing to go through that explanation with her. It helped me straighten out my ideas in my own mind.

I had better get going. Got a lesson to teach my second years before sending them off for their trial exams tomorrow morning.

D