A scary moment

I walked into our Italian classroom this morning, to find our desks in disarray. I wasn't sure what was going on, but our teacher told us not to move them. Usually, we all sit in a half circle formation. This way looked as though we were about to take a big test.

When the last of us had finally drifted in, Roberta closed the door and walked to the front of the classroom. She was not smiling.

There is possibly nothing more frightening than listening to someone chew you out in Italian. Just a few weeks ago, after we got back from Spring Break, Roberta chewed each of us out because of the compositions that we turned in. She took the whole class period to be mad at us and go over every single mistake that we made in our writings. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing: Roberta really wants us to learn.

However, I was fearing that this was another moment like that. She rattled off things so fast that I could not keep up with what she was saying. I just knew that she was saying most of our grades started out fine, but were slowly descending. She was talking about how she just corrected our compositons and we weren't getting the differences between the two past tense forms. She was clearly upset.

Then, in the midst of her angry Italian, I caught the words "pop quiz." Oh no, this can't be good. I'm not ready for that.

She was also telling us how we were getting the days of the week mixed up in our compositions. Something that we should have learned during our first weeks here. We were being careless in our writing, and not looking closely enough to fix our mistakes.

To prove that we didn't know the days of the week, she asked us "what day is it today?" "Martedi" the class replied. "What day is it tomorrow?" she asked again. After our response she repeated, "but what day is it today?" "April fools" someone answered.

Roberta cracked up.