PA Cyber Italian teacher is the real thing
Teacher of Italian for Midland cyber school gives students the real thing
Daveen Rae Kurutz, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
July 27, 2009
Daniel Mancini wanted his young son to learn proper pronunciation and grammar when speaking Italian, the language of his ancestors. What he didn't anticipate was learning alongside his son from a teacher across an ocean.
"My son is 9, and he's fairly fluent in Italian," said Mancini, 52, of Center in Beaver County. "I've spoken Italian since I was a child, and while sitting on the side, it improved my Italian."
Mancini's son was one of hundreds of students of Antonio "Tony" Mauro, the conversational Italian and German teacher for the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland. Mauro, 45, teaches from his home in Cosenza, Italy.
He became connected with the school after meeting Robert Babish, then its former executive director, on a train in Mexico. Babish and his family were having difficulty opening a window, and Mauro helped them. The two men developed a rapport, and Babish invited the Italian teacher to visit his school.
Since 2005, Mauro has taught two languages to students from across the country. The cyber school, the largest in Pennsylvania, educates about 8,000 students, most of them from Pennsylvania. Mauro visits the school once or twice a year, but with students scattered, he doesn't get to meet many of them.
"I tell the students weeks before, so we can try meet there, but some have traveled to Italy and met up with me there," Mauro said. "I love showing them my country, the real Italy."
He was born in Italy but has not spent his entire life there. During his teenage years, his family lived in Switzerland, where he learned German and French. He quickly became accustomed to speaking three languages daily — German and French at school, Italian at home.
An avid traveler today, Mauro picked up a fourth language — English — on summer visits to London.
He joined the Italian military and was sent to a naval base in Naples, where a general noted his ability to speak "good English" and he began teaching English to Italian pilots. He studied foreign languages at the University of Naples and has worked as an interpreter.
"I've taught all ages, so the only difference (in teaching at PA Cyber) was, this time, it was over the Internet," Mauro said. "Obviously there are differences, but things are a lot easier to track for the students. They can listen to the recordings of our lectures as many times as they want."
Mauro "meets" with students in an online classroom twice each week. When in Italy — he often teaches from other countries while traveling — he holds classes between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m. Italy time, which is during the day for his students.
Like Mancini's son Amante, Calista Frederick-Jaskiewicz, 13, of Pine took all four courses of conversational Italian from Mauro. She hopes to visit Italy one day and see the countryside Mauro taught her so much about.
"He makes learning a new language easy and practical," said Frederick-Jaskiewicz, a ninth-grader at PA Cyber. "It was better than having a person who doesn't have the Italian accent. Since he's a native, he makes it really precise."
When he isn't teaching at PA Cyber, Mauro is a professor at University of Calabria in Italy. He said he loves to travel and has visited nearly 85 countries on five continents. He has yet to visit Antarctica and South America. His favorite country is Mexico, where he said he would move immediately if his wife of 14 years weren't so fond of Italy.
Instead, Mauro travels with and without his wife, Gioconda, who sometimes stays home to care for their 35 cats. He hopes he can pass on his love of world cultures to his students, American and Italian.
"The world is completely different from what you think it is — you don't know what a region is like until you visit," Mauro said. "I try to teach my students a new way to look at a country. Sicily isn't Mafia and desolated land; it has the most Greek art. They learn all of this because I live here."
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