Back to School Day, Seen From the Other Side of the Desk

There's a particular kind of quiet that falls over Milan on the first day back to school. The cafés near the international schools fill up an hour earlier than usual. Parents linger a little longer at the gates than they will for the rest of the year. And somewhere, in a hundred different apartments, a student is opening a brand new notebook for French and writing the date at the top for the first time.

I don't teach in a classroom anymore, but I still feel this day. Over eleven years of tutoring, back to school has never really stopped being a small, quiet kind of exciting for me too, even from the outside.

Every September brings the same mix of faces. Returning students who message me the week before, half-joking, half-serious, asking if we can "get back into it" before their first oral practice sneaks up on them. New students, sometimes recommended by a school counsellor, sometimes found by a parent scrolling a Facebook group at midnight, who show up to a first session a little unsure of what to expect from IB French and leave it slightly more convinced they can actually do this.

What I like about today specifically, more than the first proper week of lessons, is that nothing has gone wrong yet. No one has had a rough mock exam. No one has fallen behind on Paper 1 practice or is dreading their Individual Oral. Today is just possibility. A blank notebook. A new set of prescribed themes to explore. A full year ahead where anything is still on the table.

If you're a parent reading this on your own back-to-school morning, coffee in hand, watching your child head off with a backpack that's somehow already too full: I hope the year ahead is a good one. And if French is one of the subjects on your child's plate this year, whether it's smooth sailing or something you already suspect will need a bit of extra support, feel free to reach out. I'm always glad to have a first conversation, no pressure, just to see where things stand.

Wishing everyone, students and parents alike, a genuinely good start to the year.

Louis