Knockathon gets us repetitions on “How many times?” Ringeroni gets us reps on “For how long?”
Ringeroni happens in a story whenever an actor approaches a house not to knock on the front door but to ring a doorbell:
Instructor: “Class, the girl rang the doorbell!“
Student: “Pendant combien de secondes/For how many seconds?”
This is the voice of the “Pendant Combien de Secondes?” (PCS) person. It is another job a student – possibly the same star student who handles Knockathon when it happens – has in my classroom whenever a person rings a doorbell. There are two parts to their job:
1. Just at the moment an actor in a story is about to ring a doorbell, they ask, “For how many seconds?” (did the person ring the doorbell?). This expression, of course, can be varied to minutes, months, etc.
2. Then, the Ringeroni person makes some kind of weird ringing noise, perhaps by putting their hands over their mouth with their pinky in the air while trying to synchronize the ringing motion of the actor with their sounds. They have to ring and make that sound for as long as was specified. It gets very funny.
In the story, then, when the instructor says that the actor rang the doorbell, the actor puts their finger out to press on bell, and the PCS person asks immediately, “For how long?”, then the two try to synchronize the ringing sound with the action.