Teacher hasn’t come to class for 20 years – an absurd story in 5 points Violent riots in Paris after death of 17-year-old at police check

It’s all about this

This story is hard to beat because of its absurdity: Cinzia Paolina De Lio is an Italian high school teacher from Chioggia in the Venice region. But the motivation for her job seemed and appears to be limited. De Lio worked in a school for 24 years, but she did not appear in class for about 20 years in total, as reported by the BBC, among others.

She did not appear in class at all for the first ten years, at least occasionally for the next 14 years. However, the absences predominated for various reasons: De Lio indicated, among other things, illness, personal or family reasons for her absence.

dismissal and reinstatement

How did such a case become possible without anyone intervening before? You don’t know exactly. In any case, it wasn’t until 2017 that De Lio’s school board got fed up with her occasional unreliability and fired her. However, the pedagogue, whose specialties are history and philosophy, did not want to let her down: she took legal action against the dismissal and in 2018 she was actually proven right by a Venetian judge and she was allowed to work again. Or more precisely: she was rehired.

De Lio’s “Learning Style”

Neither those responsible at the Italian Ministry of Education, who are challenging the decision, nor De Lio’s students were happy about this. Because the teacher didn’t seem to take her duties too seriously when she appeared in class as an exception.

When she taught for a few months in 2015, her students complained several times. De Lio always forgets to bring teaching materials such as textbooks, and her grading is “random and improvised”. After a while, her students refused to participate in De Lio’s lessons, also because she was “often distracted on the phone”.

The verdict of the highest court

After a long legal battle, the legality of De Lio’s dismissal was finally confirmed – after several appeals and appeals before the highest Italian court. The justification testified to a “permanent and absolute incompetence” because of her numerous absences. De Lio had argued that as a teacher she had the “freedom of teaching” and could decide for herself how she wanted to organize it. With that, she was rejected by the highest court: it is the responsibility of the teacher to guarantee the right of the students to be taught.

De Lio says so

But what does the person concerned actually say about the allegations? After De Lio, everything was very different, she explained to the Italian newspaper “Repubblica”. She has evidence to prove she wasn’t absent for 20 years. “I will show the truth of this unique, surreal story,” she told the “Repubblica”. However, she wants to wait a little longer, she also told the journalists. The reasoning: