17. 04 Parking the pupil or leave it to take himself a life?

Open inscription to Trinity College Summer School The best quoted solution for families to park the children or still a educational opportunity to learn English?

A month to go to the final exams, the most popular College of Dublin have already set off a high offer of summer courses.

Trinity College has always had a long story with overseas students and researcher, no wonder a short of competition between locals and foreigners is increasingly growing up.

I actually live in Spain, thanks to an Erasmus project finance and that’s why it’s so far from me to scorn the whole category, but if I have to choose a summer mete, I’ll easily do that on my own.

Nothing will never be as my first travel to Dublin, where I haven’t even thought about an inscription to any kind of course, but I’ve more properly experienced the urban Dubliner lifestyle from the bar of the Czech Inn. Otherwise, I would be so curious to ask to the manifold families abroad what this I’ve just asked myself, reading the TCD magazine. Is nowadays sending pupils to summer language camp a way to let them to have really a second language contact?

My family has never made up their mind to travel and, obviously, they have never manifested either the idea of educating us to learn a second language.

Nevertheless, my unquiet attitude of moving sprang from, I don’t know, maybe the fact that nobody’ have forced me or, probably, it traces back to the ancestral Freudian necessity to rebel, at one point of your life.

More in concrete, I’ve never chosen for accommodating in a comfortable international expensive campus, talking in Italian with my mates all the time and eating my Barilla pasta.

I’ve lived right here, in Dame street, in a 24 beeded dorm, with no Italian guests for the first tree weeks, I’ve drunk every morning Irish Coffee, nothing with our concept of the “espresso” breakfast, I’ve had a no-way-back whisky (hang hover), I’ve illegally hitch-hiked to Belfast. And that’s how I’ve learning the English that I’m quite proud to know.

To close this (please tolerate it)auto-celebration, I’m of the strong opinion that there’s a slightly difference between “travel and learn” and “have a trip and go to school. And, in any case, I wouldn’t make my children to have even more than their ordinary language lesson, in respect to their personal human and cultural develop, which may exclude learning other languages at all.