Dear friends!

All teachers secretly miss the first school week of students in first classes: those wonderful days when pupils still keep very quiet and polite, never forget to raise their hand before asking to be excused and look very respectful and shy!

Generally the idyll lasts no more than the following Monday (if school started on Monday, of course…) since one week is enough to the youngsters for making friendship and inheriting the old wisdom from their friends in the upper classes which mainly consists in learning how to play truant without showing the parents’ booklet of justifications, where is that secret place where you can smoke your first forbidden cigarette unnoticed and how to read messages on your cellphone with no revealing ringing or head and eyes’ movement. 

Still the first days of students’ career in a new school are paradise for us teachers. Our pupils are simply adorable; not being able to be too talkative as they don’t know each other well, perhaps do not even know their classmates’ names, how can they chat merrily and disrupt our carefully planned lessons?

Coming to the point: for what reason on earth should we advocate for “icebreakers” in order to make them socialize? After all they will know each other soon, at that age it is not a problem to get in touch with other human beings… why should we try to enhance the process and lose even those few days of calmness and tranquility? Aren’t we being masochistic after all?

The whole thing should be considered from another point of view: much of what happens in classroom, and most of the things we are seldom aware of, have to do with “power” and the person who detains it. On the first school days our students simply have no power and they know that: they are a platoon of soldiers coming from different armies and wearing different uniforms. They don’t share a common

knowledge of what the battle field is and are completely defenseless in front of their enemy (you, of course…) who also happen to be the only person who they know and who has the right and power to call them by name since he (she) is handling a register with an alphabetical list. Besides, they don’t know how you would react to an act of insubordination and, therefore, what is supposed to be mere shyness and quietness is generally a seething silent process of observation and close watching by which they collect information about you and your directive style: do you allow them to chew gum? Can you be easily cheated or are you always attentive to their underwater movements? Are you enough human as to smile twice an hour or do you eat living students at lunchtime?

Let’s go back to our dilemma which is: should they socialize or shouldn’t they during their very first days in a new school? Is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous teenagers’ comradeship or is it more advisable to rise against it and make them shut up? Well, the answer is: turn yourself from their enemy into their general!

 If you allow communication flow freely on the first days they will socialize because you wanted them to do that; if this is the case, communication among peers will not be felt as an act of insubordination or treason but as something planned exactly by you. And also, in the long run, they will see you as the person who promoted and enhanced friendship and free communication, not as the one who fought the expression of ideas, feelings and emotions.

Obviously you will be the art director of the process and will consciously lead it to your goals and, therefore, always in charge and in control of every aspects of group dynamics! Well… nearly always!

So now it’s time to dive into icebreakers, brrr!

Love from

I want to socialize!!!