(music Ennio Moriccone) Note: the names in the text are not the real ones During my first exam period as Ombudsman for about 1200 students of the Teacher Training Department, I had to deal with several problems. One of the most popular reasons (excuses?) were sickness and the question to…

Every October, for the past 10 years, the Intercultural Centre Miguelim opens its doors to the school of Italian for foreign women. My class is composed by 25 women of different age and national groups, and 4 teachers: Maria Stella — one of our long-standing volunteers, a truly creative genie…

I have mastered the Dutch language bit by bit and people say that my Dutch is better than average. I do not have any accent and sometimes I get compliments for that. I always answer that most Austrians learn to speak Dutch accent-free because they have soft consonants like the…

There are hundreds of occassions where peope work together in a team: they go play football, play in a band or write a paper together. I really like to work in a team, but sometimes I meet people who prefer to split the tasks, and in the end each of…

A new school year is about to start and soon my students and I will be facing nine months of hard work to prepare for their diploma…

The bell rings. The noise calms down and fifteen suntanned 11-year-olds enter the classroom. The holiday’s just finished and they still have sparkles in their eyes. So eager and willing to learn. We haven’t seen one another for two months and I’m very curious how they spent their holiday. What…

As this was my turn to write here, I had a clear idea to talk about Graphic Facilitation. How thinking in pictures can also help you to learn a language. I planned this blog entry to be more professional, but then a story came into my way and my blog…

Funny images on the internet, artworks with texts, gif videos… yes, these are memes. But what’s a meme in real? — The notion of memes originates from Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist from the 1970’s. He says that some evolutionary principles can be applied in explaining the spread of ideas. In biology the attribution of creatures are set by its genes, just like in a culture, where the nature of…

I do not know how things work in other countries, but in Romania, for many people of my generation, knowing English was like a challenge. Coming from a culture that was very attached to French, I hardly replaced “je taime” (sic!) with “I love you” — and I could not…