I Tried to Fail Spanish on Purpose

I tried to fail Spanish on purpose, and I passed with a 62%.

It was the first semester of ninth grade and the class was brutal. I couldn’t access any of the audio portions, my grades were sinking, and I was miserable, so I came up with a plan. If you failed the class, the school would automatically drop you from it, so failing became my way out. I stopped trying entirely, and I wasn’t subtle about it either. I’d walk in, pull out Dr. Dobb’s, a programming magazine from the 90s, and read about algorithms and data structures while the rest of the class conjugated verbs and listened to tapes I couldn’t parse anyway. The thing I actually cared about was sitting right there in my hands while I waited out a class my ears couldn’t reach.

Then the grades came back. 62%, a D-minus, passing. I genuinely couldn’t understand why my second semester schedule still had Spanish on it, because the whole plan had been to fail my way out, and somehow, between guessing on the audio tests and scraping together points on the written work I could actually do, I’d cleared the bar. So I was stuck, with two more years of it ahead of me.

Looking back there’s something almost funny about it. A kid who couldn’t hear well enough to learn Spanish, reading about programming instead, trying his hardest to fail, and accidentally passing anyway. The same stubbornness that would eventually drag me through community college and into RIT was already there. I just had it aimed at the wrong target.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss