ITAL 1010

Professor Calamita is the best! If you're interested at all in taking Italian, take it with her! Her class is fun and easy, but I also know that I'm learning a lot about Italian language and culture. You will have to do daily internet assignments, but they're straight out of the book and not difficult. We have a test every week and a half, but I haven't scored lower than a 90% on any of them so far. As long as you study the night before, you will be fine! Professor Calamita cares about her students, and makes the class interactive and fun! It's four credits, so the high grade will boost your gpa. The class is every day, but the 50 minutes goes by fast and it's not as big a deal as it originally seems. Take this class, you won't regret it!

She's super nice but she's a super hard grader. If pick up languages fast I would recommend her because she's the better teacher, but for a better grade definitely go Sandro.

This class is exactly what you'd expect out of an elementary language class. Each day is pretty repetitive -- learn grammar, practice grammar and vocab, group work. Professor Calamita is awesome though-- really enthusiastic and really cares about her students. If you do the assigned homework each night (that you can re-do as many times as you want, so really easy to do well in if you just put the time into it) and study minimally for the tests you will undoubtedly do well. #tcf2016

Professor Calamita is a very good professor to take intro to Italian with. I have no prior experience in any Romance languages so it was a bit hard to learn at the rate everyone else was but I feel confident that I learned all the necessary things that my classmates did. The way the class is structured is a bit off. You teach yourself that language online through the textbook service as homework, which in my opinion is terrible. The next day, Professor Calamita goes over the material you learned and you do more textbook activities similar to the ones you did online. You also have to create an Italian blogs and have assignments that you have to post to it. The textbook itself is terrible and resembles more of a workbook then a textbook because, honestly, half of it is empty with blank spaces. This was the class I definitely did the most work for and I'm not sure that it entirely paid off. Given the chance, I would take the class with Professor Calamita again because she is genuinely amazing and a good teacher. She is very straightforward on what she expects and the test reviews you do are a very accurate representation of the tests you take.

Taking intro Italian w/ Prof. Calamita was great. I have taken Spanish in the past so learning Italian wasn't too hard. Textbook was required to purchase for the online homework and workbook problems we did during class. Classes were set up where you had to read the material before class, and then she would go over it and you would do workbook sentences/speaking in person/zoom (it was hybrid). She incorporates a lot about Italian culture, gender equality, and inclusivity during the course which was pretty interesting. #tCFF23

The breakdown was: Participation: 15%, Homework: 10%, Italian Diary: 10%, Cultural Competency: 10%, Speaking: 10%, Chapter Tests: 25%, Final Project: 20%

Homework was both Italian diary and the online textbook due on Friday (they switch each week which was due). Italian diary was basically online discussion and speaking response videos and for the online textbook she gives you up to 5 tries to get a better score. I heard other prof. had homework assigned almost every day so something due once a week isn't too bad at all. Attendance is "mandatory" but she wasn't too strict about it. There were 5 quizzes but they weren't too hard imo (if you study a day or two before) and the final was a group project that took an 30min-1 hour max to do.

Prof. Calamita is super kind if you had any questions and even gives points back on homework if there were technical issues (if enough people emailed she would give some answers...) Would 100% take intro with her if you have the chance!

Calamita formerly taught more advanced Italian, and it showed sometimes in this course when she would speak for sentences on end in just Italian. She is super friendly and cares about her students' success, but wasn't super knowledgable about HER OWN textbook that she made us read. The homework interface is terrible but that's uniform across intro Italian classes. Same goes for lectures, where we basically just went through the textbook– it was pretty monotonous. That's to be expected with an intro class, though. With some Duolingo experience I thought the class was incredibly easy– even with the bar for an A being a 96, it wasn't particularly challenging. Hardest part was the stupidly formatted online worksheets, which were tedious. I'm not sure if she's better than whoever else is teaching the class, but she's a solid prof and Italian is a super fun language :)
Note that she has a hearing condition (tho maybe she just got surgery on it?) that made approx 1/3 classes on Zoom, and man were the Zoom classes boring