This article is one of a series of posts dedicated to our latest project, Humans of La Tour. Inspired by the successful Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, Humans of La Tour is comprised of a series of journalistic portraits created by the Journalism students at La Tour. They seek to highlight a few of the many people who make up the La Tour community: those we see every day as our professors and classmates, as well as those whose hard work and dedication keep the school running smoothly on a daily basis.
Each portrait was created by an Anglophone Section student in Ms. Temple’s Journalism Elective as part of their final project for the Spring Semester 2021.
By Maria ADWAN (2EA)
Who is Ms. Pivato, a Spanish Teacher at La Tour?
For our journalism elective this semester, we were asked to interview a member of the La Tour community to discover a little bit more about their life in and out of school. So, I decided to interview my Spanish teacher, Ms. Pivato, to get to know her personality and job at La Tour a little bit more. My choice was driven by a two-folded purpose: firstly, by the fact that Ms. Pivato is relatively new La Tour, and secondly, because she has had a rich life experience, having lived in several countries before coming to France. She kindly accepted to answer my questions on a Friday morning during the break. We went to Ms. Fugoni’s office and started the interview. She told me about her career, her job and her passions.
She came to work at La Tour just last year as a Spanish teacher with the Academie de Paris, and this year, at the advanced Spanish level as part of La Tour du Monde. Ms. Pivato has been teaching for 20 years, lived in many different countries such as Italy, Scotland and her native country, Spain, which reflects her multicultural personality and her ability to speak different languages (when she arrived in France 20 years ago, she did not speak a word of French, she says!) Moreover, she has a master’s degree in philosophy.
Since her childhood, she has always wanted to teach. In fact, she loved to help her classmates when they had difficulties, especially in mathematics. Even if, as she says, “it is a job which is not very well considered in France economically or socially, unlike in Spain, where it is better considered,” she decided to become a teacher. What attracts her in this job is the ability “to transmit the passion I have for life,” she says. She adds that she is very delighted to teach in advanced Spanish, which enables here to “get off the beaten path” and create her own program. In fact, the Academie does not allow her to teach in her own way because she is bound to a very rigid program.
Furthermore, she has many memories and has had many wonderful moments over the course of her experience in teaching. She chose to tell me about one poignant memory in particular: after spending 12 years teaching in a school, she decided to leave, and her students gave her a departing gift, which particularly touched her. It was a book with emotion-filled wishes and thoughts about their time together. They “were attached to my way of teaching and to me in a way,” she says, “I give too much to my students, but, in turn, they pass me the buck.”
Mrs. Pivato is passionate about teaching, but also about literature and cinema. She appreciates the book, Les Desorientés, by the author Amin Maalouf. In fact, she identifies with the characters who feel they are strangers in every place they go to. They feel like foreigners in their own countries because it has been a long time since they left, but also in other countries where they are strangers.
It was a good experience to interview a teacher whom you meet every day without knowing much about her. She accepted to talk to me openly, and this enabled us to break momentarily the barrier between teacher and student and to highlight different aspects of our characters, which are not ordinarily perceived.
The Tower Times Blog 