The Spanish Class I Was Never Going to Pass

My mother insisted I take Spanish starting in ninth grade, I made it through two and a half years, and I never got higher than a D.

The part that broke me was the listening tests. The teacher would play a pre-recorded tape of native speakers talking at full speed, exactly once, no replays for anyone in the room, and then we’d answer questions about what we just heard. I couldn’t process a single word of it, so I’d look at the multiple choice answers, circle something at random, and hope. It was the preschool songs all over again, the same thing I’ve dealt with my whole life, where audio at natural speed with no words on a page in front of me just turns into noise. Except now there were grades attached to it.

The written work was a different story. Verb conjugation, sentence structure, vocabulary, all of that I could actually do, because I learn language through patterns on a page, the same way Mrs. Rios taught me to read English. My brain handles language I can see just fine. It’s language I have to catch by ear that falls apart.

Those D’s dragged my GPA down hard, and I’m sure they cost me with colleges later, years of failing grades in a subject my ears genuinely couldn’t reach. The whole time I was sitting in that classroom reading Dr. Dobb’s, a programming magazine, with the thing I actually loved right there in my hands while I was stuck in a class I was never going to pass.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss