Teaching English on the Island of Elba

by Linnea West | 2010

If a person is familiar with the island of Elba at all, it is probably because Napoleon was exiled there in 1814. In fact his luxurious pink villa remains there, furnished in high Regency style and overlooking the Mediterranean. That was all I knew about the location of my first job teaching English; the detail kept ricocheting through my head along with the palindrome "Able I was, ere I saw Elba" as I boarded the ferry at Piombino along with a few other camp employees and a gaggle of Italian preteens.

Never was I made more aware of how bad my Italian was, even when I squeaked through the interview that landed me the job as an English teacher at a summer camp. On the ferry, a skeptical-looking administrator asked me how I could possibly teach English when I could barely speak Italian. I answered with the same reason given to me while I was pursuing my CTEFL (Certification to Teach English as a Foreign Language): that I and the students knew enough to have basic lessons, and the point is to make them speak English as much as possible. She remained unconvinced. But I, too, had doubts. "Able I was, ere I saw Elba" ran through my head again as I saw the chalky mountains rise behind the harbor city of Portoferraio. We had arrived.

I didn't need a skeptical woman to tell me I was in over my head. I was 20 years old, had just completed my CTEFL, and this was my first job outside of stocking the shelves at the university bookstore. It involved preteens and teaching. Did I mention, despite two years of study and living in Italy the past four months, that no, my Italian was not that good? Yet a roommate had decided to take a job teaching English on a cruise ship instead of teaching at a summer camp, and she recommended me for the camp position just as I was finishing my four-week CTEFL course. Voila!—I had a teaching job. I rolled my ridiculously large suitcase down the ferry ramp and anxiously scanned the preteens for signs of rebellion. It was hot and dusty, and I was terrified.

Miraculously, or so it seemed to me, six weeks later I was cracking jokes to my students. "Que utile, eh? (How useful, huh?) I asked, waggling my sunglasses at a student on the beach under a cloudy sky. To my surprise, not only had I managed to stay on the island, but also I had finally learned to speak fluent Italian. In addition, I learned how to teach English and gained a deeper understanding of Italian culture. In many ways, I had come into my own, but I had also discovered that it could be incredibly lonely as well as liberating to be a foreigner.

It was a world in which I held a strange, singular place. The camp was on a large campground where families of Italians, and a few Germans, would come to spend a month together laying on the beach and playing bocce. I was the only American and the only fluent English-speaker. The camp I worked for had its tents in a separate area, where I interacted mainly with my students. My own tent, next to the kids, was where I fashioned a makeshift sort of life. My suitcase took up half the tent, and rarely used teaching supplies were strewn in corners. Tents make the experience sound rugged, but we were ten yards from a large set of bathrooms and ate all our meals at the camp's restaurant. Breakfast began with pitchers of café au lait and soft bread; dinner consisted of a three-course meal, one of the wonders of Italian camping.

I gave one lesson a day, typically the hour before lunch. My pupils sat at two picnic tables (it was a very small camp) under the shade of pine trees and in front of a white eraser board where I conducted the lessons I had prepared before I left Florence, thinking camping and ocean vocabulary would be appropriate. The kids were at camp, and English lessons were not their idea of a good time. They were in different grades and spoke different levels of English, which they were very shy about actually speaking. While I learned how to be a better teacher, I also learned that teaching English as a foreign language can simply be difficult. It was probably much like learning to teach anywhere else; I threw out half my pre-planned lessons, made due, had a breakthrough and a good lesson or two, and waited for the week to end and the next group to come in. With each group, the students were a little different and I was a little better prepared for them.

Despite the foreignness of my campmates, I discovered something that was universal, a cultural touchstone across the globe. One night at an evening BBQ and dance put on by the campground, the DJ turned off the pulsing pop music and called everyone to the concrete dance floor for a group song. It was a very special dance—the chicken dance. I learned it in elementary school in the United States. To my surprise, my shy campers all knew how to wave their hands, flap their arms like chickens, and wiggle their bums in exactly the same way I did as a child. The chorus was a little different, but I was delighted to recognize something we had in common, even if it was the just the chicken dance.

Summer ended and I boarded the ferry feeling ready to leave, but a little sad. Teaching on Elba had put me more outside of my culture than I would have thought possible in well-traveled Italia. I was happy in all that I had learned during my time on the island, not to mention more than pleased to have finally gained fluency in Italian. As one of my students ran over to tell me about her first kiss, I was too distracted to remember that old palindrome that had seemed so prophetic, "Able I was, Ere I saw Elba." As the ferry chugged on, Elba slipped away in the distance.

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