From A0 to C2: on an equal footing with the Italians (part 10)

This is the final part in a series about how it took me 20 years to become a certified Italian teacher. In part 9 you could read how I passed my C2 exam, which taught me how to speak and write better than many Italians themselves.

Italian didactics

My language school was going well in 2018 and 2019. Somewhere around that time I read about the DITALS exam that you could prepare for in Amsterdam and take at the Italian Cultural Institute. DITALS I is an exam on Italian didactics. In Italy it is used for people who want to teach foreigners. It is a certificate that gives access to that profession, just like you have an NT2 certificate in the Netherlands.

The program included about 10 scientific books on linguistics, sociolinguistics and especially didactics. In addition, you had to have worked hours as a teacher in the form of an internship. This involved a number of meetings, which unfortunately I was not able to attend all of them, because my father's health was very bad at that time and I wanted to be with him a lot.

The exam consisted of 3 parts

In the first part you had to analyze an exercise very extensively, in the 2nd part you had to make an exercise yourself and in the 3rd part you simply had to reproduce a lot of knowledge. Each part was about 2 hours, so this, like the C2 exam, was another battle of attrition.

I passed the first 2 parts. That summer I took a resit for the last part, but I failed again! Have you been keeping track of my failures, failures and misfires? This was another one.

That same year I wanted to resit the last part again, but then my psychological problems started to bother me again, so I had to stop all activities for six months. Shortly afterwards, corona broke out, which turned things upside down even further.

This is Italian

I then worked for a year on the first online training courses for This is Italian and I also did volunteer work for PsychoseNet for a year. But the third component had to be completed within 3 years after the first components. So I had until March 2022.

Time just ticked and ticked. And then there was a moment in the spring of 2021 when I thought: I'm going to try again. That last part should work. Then I spent 3 months studying, during a period when I had nothing else to do.

First read all the books again and read some extra books that were on the list as optional. To the floor. Making summaries and then memorizing those summaries. I could have also made a summary of that summary, because because there were about 10 books on the program, it was about 70 pages...

It is too difficult…

There were actually some during my studies for that last part meltdowns been. Moments when I thought: I can't do this, it's too much, it's too difficult. I doubted whether I wanted to finish it. But here my husband helped and supported me. He said, you can do this. You want this. It's not fun now, but later you'll be very proud of yourself if you've made it. Whoever says A must also say B. You are not a dropout, you are a go-getter! All that pep talk worked and I persevered.

The night before the exam I replayed everything in my head in bed. There would be 10 multiple choice questions and 5 open questions. On the day itself, my husband traveled to Amsterdam and waited outside in a café. This last part took about 1,5 hours.

When I closed the door behind me after the exam, I had a good feeling about it. Back on the train I looked up all the answers and did the math. Had I achieved the required 24 out of 40 points? I did not know. Over the next few weeks I would continue to calculate occasionally. If they counted that correctly... but they would probably count that wrong...

I received the results in October 2021

I scored 29 out of 40 points and passed the exam. I could cry with happiness. Why did this affect me so much? Maybe if you read all 10 blogs and sympathized with me, you will understand the answer.

Life is not always easy and many things don't go as you would like, but by persevering in the face of setbacks you can still achieve things and with more pride than if it all went smoothly.