Femke van Twuijver
Since April this year I have been an official teacher after completing the PABO in the Netherlands. Because I studied online flexibly, I was allowed to do an internship at a real Italian primary school. Completely happy with my diploma, I then started my job search.
There are almost no practical internships in Italy and the substitutes hardly speak generally civilized…, er, neat Italian. You may already do stand-in work if you were born before 1972 and went to school until you were 13. That will be a breeze for me, I thought. But then I didn't know the Italian bureaucracy well enough.
Italian at C1 level
The first office I go into is around the corner. After some snooping on the computer (luckily I didn't have to wait hours before I was allowed in) they came with the announcement that I needed at least a C1 diploma in Italian.
It also happened that a 'list' was opened in June this year where you could register as a recent graduate to do stand-in work. That was lucky, because such a registration list is only available once every 3 years. Just arrange that exam and Kees is ready. Guess what, those official exams are 3 times a year and the next one is in July!
Once every 3 years
How can you, as a government, give graduates the opportunity to register for stand-by work for one month every 3 years? And then placing the Italian exam after the closing date… And then we are talking about stand-in work here, not even about a permanent job in education.
Nevertheless, I passed the exam and passed with an 8,4! Do I also want to request a statement from the Dutch Education Executive Agency that my diploma is genuine? Yes of course. Why not? And then it is already summer vacation and everything that has to do with school is closed for almost 3 months. sigh.
The Equipollenza
Do you think you have everything in order, turns out to be a so-called equivalence to be necessary. In short, proof of how much my diploma is worth according to the Italians. Well, more than yours!
The office in the village sends me to a town an hour away and they send me back to Turin. Hello, I'm not staying busy! Turns out I have all exam components including topics and I don't know what to have translated. Sure enough, who is ever going to read those 5.000 pages? There must be another way.
Russian translators
For a pick-me-up, I stop by my old internship, where they send me to the union. 'Dutch? No, I do know Russian translators.' Almost the same, isn't it? During my next appointment I happened to meet the director. Fortunately, he knew more about it and gave me the correct information. If I couldn't figure it out via the internet I could always call him. Now I'm going to visit again next week, because I still don't understand whether I should literally have everything translated.
Maybe next year there will be one competition for a permanent appointment, but no one knows whether that will actually happen. For the time being, I can't help but resign myself to the bureaucratic red tape. If only I had been born before 1972, I could retire at 55 without ever having studied!
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