Allora oggi . . . I have been in Firenze for just over a week now and have my first week of language class behind me with two more weeks to go.  As previously mentioned, this is the third Italian language school I have attended in Italy AND by far my favorite.  This week I had one teacher for two hours of Italian grammar ever day and another teacher for two hours of Italian conversation.  In fact, I was with a different group of students for Italian conversation.  Apparently, my Italian comprehension and verbal skills are better than my understanding of Italian grammar.  I really and truly liked my conversation teacher and I thoroughly enjoyed the other students in our conversation class.  We had a blast all week!  We laughed a lot, learned about each other and each individual’s home country and culture.  I was in hog heaven.

Whenever I begin leadership coaching with a new client, I always ask the person “what adds value to your life?”  My motivation for revealing this little morsel of news is because the conversation class this week hit upon several of my add value to life items.  For example, it adds value to my life to get to know new people beyond the ordinary trivial information.  Check.  To have fun and laugh, check.  To learn, check.  To hang out and have coffee with interesting conversation, check, check . . . and check.  In previous conversation classes the dialogues were contrived and superficial.  For example, topics like giving and receiving directions, making up stuff about shopping, ordering in a restaurant and other phony information that fell flat and quite frankly bored me to tears.  Conversation with Rita as our teacher was anything but boring.  She was engaging, lively, animated, and creative with questions, insightful, enthusiastic, interested and interesting.  Rita is a natural at extracting information from each student.   In fact, at times conversational class was more like Italian group therapy, the fun type.

Considering that I picked Istituto il David Language School hours before departing for my trip, things worked out beautifully.  We will see what next week brings apparently, all the teachers and classes are being switched.