“April Fools!” Is Rarely Music To Anyone’s Ears

I am eight years old. Our music teacher seems like a nice woman until, in one class, she tells us we are to memorise the lyrics for six songs by next week, word for word. As we’re eight, our class is afraid to protest. During the week, we are all terrified, and my parents agree that the teacher is requiring too much. However, it being a different time and place, merely a few years after my country has become independent from the Soviet Union, people simply are not used to challenging authority.

The dreaded day comes. The teacher hands out empty papers and assigns us to write the exact lyrics to one of the songs. We are all quietly panicking, but we start writing down the lyrics as well as we can. She tells us to hand the papers over and that she’ll return them after lunch. It is a long and scary lunch break, but finally, it ends. She enters the classroom with our tests.

During that horrible week, no one has paid attention to the date. The first of April. She has not corrected or graded anything, only written, “April Fools!” on every test.

Painfully, I see later that I actually managed to write down the exact lyrics, word for word. The fact that she did not even bother to give us all As for effort really bothers me.