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When I walked into Italian class this morning I was informed by a frantic Professor that I was going to be taking over the class, along with another one of her more advanced students. Apparantly her son was sick and her husband couldn’t take care of him, and she was sick as well, so she decided to leave today’s review session in our capable (?) hands. Before she left, she handed me some papers and instructed me to go over them with the class. Only one section of the paper had an answer key, so I just had to assume that my answers were all correct, though I can confidently say they were.

Upon realization that there was no professor in class, several students left (no offense taken, I might have done the same if I hadn’t been put in charge). I’m actually surprised as many students stayed as they did- the majority of the class- but I’m sure that’s only because there’s a quiz next class, and today was the review.

It was a bit chaotic at first- I couldn’t get the class to pay attention, people were chatting, disregarding me, doing the crossword, etc. It got better as the class went on but, being a fellow classmate and not in charge of their grades, it was a lot harder for me to get people to pay attention and answer the questions. I even got some dirty looks when I corrected people’s pronunciation, etc.

Going over the work went well; the students had a lot of questions and I think I was rather good at answering them in ways they could understand. I only messed up once: I thought “di solito” meant “by him/her self” when it actually means “usually.” I corrected myself eventually, though, and hopefully the rest of the class was paying attention when I did.

I also had a bit of an embarassing moment. We had to read a dialogue between two people, then complete a “fill in the blank” exercise about the dialogue. One of the sentences read:

“Oscar vuole andare a ___________ Mabel in macchina.”

which literally translates to:

“Oscar wants to go ___________ Mabel in (his) car.”

The correct answer is ____prendere___ which would make the answer, “Oscar wants to go pick up Mabel in his car.”

The class was having a hard time getting the answer, however, so I had the unfortunate lack of foresight to say, “Come on, guys, what does Oscar want to do to Mabel in his car?”

Which, of course, set on bouts of crude laughter from the students.

We got through the class without further incident, however, and I’m pleased to say I think I did a decent job. I had a few students thank me profusely for explaining things in English (our professor speaks only Italian), and one student even said he learned more today than he had all semester.