I am now coming out of a short teaching experience in an international school in Italy. For a year I taught science and geography in their middle school. Today is my last day and while the kids are relaxing in their own way I am reflecting on a few things that this short experience has brought to my mind. Starting with the last one: all the kids, indiscriminately, relax using their mobile phones. One of my generation is immediately reminded of how we would have done, 45 years ago in middle school, to relax in an hour left free for leisure. I used to draw. Nobody had computers at home. Very rarely there were the first, now ridiculous, electronic games. I never had a game console in my entire life.
Social
Being who we really are
Not many of us are lucky enough to be who they really ar
e. The luckiest ones at least “know” who they really are even if they actually aren’t that. I’ve always admired people who made a life out of their passions. It takes a lot to achieve it, unless your passion is working for a bank or being a government employee: you study and work in order to get a job and you’re set. But what if you want to be, say, a painter? The entire world will tell you not to do it, you will be starving, you need at least a plan B. But the ones who keep on and succeed in doing this are the ones who did not listen…
Thanksgiving my ….?
This year I had the chance to celebrate the Thanksgiving with some American friends of mine. I am completely Italian and I still have many doubts about celebrating Halloween in our country or having a Black Friday here. But I am the same one who didn’t believe McDonald’s had a chance in the country of pizza and I am still dubious about any business for Starbucks here. But I was proved wrong, so I gladly enjoyed the thanksgiving dinner in Rome with some dear American friends.
We are our passions
When I was a child, people knew me as the kid who sang the songs also imitating the sounds of the instruments with his mouth. I remember how amused my uncles and aunts were as I covered some famous Italian melodies of the time. Unfortunately I was not exposed as a kid in the 60s/70s to the great music of those years. Rolling Stones, dei Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Doors, Pink Floyd, were there but no one suggested I listened to them.
My 14-year-old niece just bought her first new turntable
It is quite incredible that in the age of Spotify and Apple Music a teenager has actually looked for and purchased a turntable off the Internet. Vinyl records sales have surpassed the CDs a while ago. Digital music does no longer need a physical support. Compressed formats have reached an almost accetable quality even to hifi geeks like me. Teenagers largely use their own phones to download or stream their preferred music and MP3 players are disappearing. Nonetheless people have continued to buy vinyl records at an increasing rate. What surprised me was that teenagers would do it, too!
The 2016 Central Italy Earthquake
I am an Italian geologist and how can an Italian geologist not love the mountains of Central Apennines? This particular area of the Apennine Mountains has a precise geodynamical meaning. And they are also beautiful, green, with small villages harmoniously perched on the slopes around 1000 m above sea level, in an area where four different Italian regions meet: Latium, Marche, Umbria, and Abruzzo. Also an area of high seismic risk.