I’m sure you’ve heard the piece of advice that goes, “fake it until you make it.” It’s all about faking a skill set in order to put it into practice and eventually master it.
Well, somewhere in Arizona, there is a high school Italian class full of kids who have no idea their teacher has been one chapter ahead of them for over a decade. It worked perfectly, until a transfer student from Milan showed up.
For the last 11 years, this man has been teaching Italian at a public high school located in Phoenix, even though he cannot speak the language. Well, he can as long as it’s inside the textbook he uses for class, but he is not fluent at all.
Back in college, he took Italian for two semesters and never got above a B. But when his school district desperately needed an Italian teacher in 2014, he told them he could do it.
“The pay bump was decent, and I figured, how hard could Italian 1 be? I stayed one chapter ahead of the kids. Used Google Translate a lot. Played a LOT of vocabulary games and cultural videos,” he explained.
“Yesterday, this new transfer student walks in. From Milan. Actually Italian. I’ve had exactly one native speaker in all these years, and she was adopted as a baby, so it was fine.”
“But this kid… he started talking to me in Italian after class, and I just…froze. I understood maybe every fifth word? I panicked and said my family’s dialect is really different (I’m not even Italian, I’m Irish and German) and that I was late for a meeting.”
The kid appeared puzzled and let down as he rushed off. And while yes, he faked his skills to land his job, he’s truly a wonderful teacher.
His kids all do well on the AP exam they have to take, they enjoy his class, and he does everything he can to keep his lessons intriguing for his students.
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However, he knows he’s a fraud, and he’s been living this way for more than a decade without it catching up to him. Luckily, his principal and all the administrators don’t speak Italian, so they have had no idea he’s faking it.
“The textbook basically teaches itself at this level, TBH. I feel like [a jerk] but also…IDK. Part of me thinks this is just how things work,” he continued.
“Like, half the people teaching aren’t experts in their subject. My ex-wife’s dad taught Spanish for 30 years and told me once he was ‘conversational at best.’ I’m not looking for advice. I know what this is. Just needed to say it out loud.”
Well, he’s the embodiment of faking it until you make it! The next time he runs into the kid from Milan, he can tell him that he’s rusty with his Italian, since he’s been stuck speaking it at a beginner level for so long.
And now, he has an opportunity here to push himself to master the language, and he can practice speaking to this new kid!
What do you think of the secret he’s been keeping?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
