I Cheated on a Ninth Grade Spanish Test

No bueno.

By the time I started kindergarten, I knew how to read. I don’t mean just sounding out the letters on a stop sign or recognizing my name. I could do those things shortly before turning four. By the time kindergarten started, I was already reading Dr. Seuss and Little Golden Books. I can’t remember a time in elementary school when I didn’t have a magazine subscription to Sesame Street or The Electric Company or Highlights or 3-2-1 Contact.

Public schools are not designed to deal with kids like me. My kindergarten teacher had thirty kids to deal with. In a world of bell curves, on the far left were kids who ate glue, a whole bunch in the middle who didn’t know all their basic colors, and one weirdo perfectly content to be left alone so he could read or write or draw.

At the beginning of third grade our teacher handed us workbooks full of assignments. The book was full of vocabulary words, word searches, and crossword puzzles. I remember being fascinated by lessons on synonyms, antonyms, homonyms and heteronyms. The workbook seemed so fun to me that the first weekend of school I took it home and did the whole thing. I don’t mean I did the whole week’s worth of assignments; I mean I did the entire year’s worth of assignments over the weekend. Having me as a student must have been as frustrating as it was entertaining. Although my school didn’t officially allow third graders in the gifted program, they made an exception for me.

Being in gifted was the highlight of elementary school. We did puzzles and solved mysteries and built stuff and played on computers and did independent studies. I only spent 20% of my week in gifted (Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, I think) but it was the only time my brain felt alive. Back in my regular classroom our teacher would hand out sheets of math problems which I would fill out and turn in before the entire class had received theirs. In gifted I got to study clowns for nine weeks, which is when I learned how to juggle.

I was in middle school when I figured out that some of what we were being taught in school would have no effect on my life. While things we were learning in English and math class seemed applicable to real life, I struggled to understand why I would ever need to know the specific dates of battles from wars that happened centuries before I was born. Look, algebra’s important. It’s embarrassing how many people can’t figure a 15% tip or make change in their head. But knowing what day of the week the Treaty of Versailles was signed seemed like useless trivia to me.

This brings us to my ninth grade Spanish class.

Our school offered three foreign language classes: Spanish, German, and French. Living in Oklahoma with only Texas between us and the southern border, I chose Spanish, a decision I do not regret. My Spanish is not good. I once asked a member of our custodial staff at work how good my Spanish was. She said it was on par with a young child with “special needs.” She was not making a joke.

All “evaluaciones” aside, I enjoyed learning Spanish, which I took for two years. I no longer remember how to conjugate verbs properly or most of the vocabulary words, but I do remember “de donde esta el bano” (where is the bathroom) and “tienes cerveza?” (do you have beer?). But I also recognize “ayudeme, por favor” which means “help me, please” and have had people ask me that in public. What follows may be a wild game of charades (or, now, a “Google Translate” session), but when someone asks you for help, in any language, you help.

Also, it comes in handy if you and your wife find yourself in Barcelona for a weekend.

Spanish was a class I truly enjoyed, which doesn’t make it seem like a class I would cheat on a test in. But like I said, my brain was already beginning to develop its own system of determining what things would be useful to me in the future and what was nonsense designed to keep kids busy.

Ninth and tenth grade offered a lot of opportunites for me. Our school offered “mini-courses” which were nine-week classes that focused on a particularly niche topic. For example, I took one on “humor” during which we brought jokes in to analyze and worked on short stand-up comedy routines. The only downside to these mini-courses was that they took place during the day (which was good) but you were required to make up any missed work.

And I missed a Spanish test. Not just a normal Spanish test where we would fill in blanks or write sentences. No, this was a test in which we were handed a blank map of South America and had to fill in every country’s name. Memorizing a dozen or more countries was not beyond my capabilities. I cannot tell you the amount of useless trivia related to movies and music I had already amassed by that point. But something in my brain knew that I would never need to know excactly where Bolivia was located and refused to commit such things to memory. No matter how much I tried, I could not memorize a single country’s location. This was at a time in which I could tell you the complete Saturday morning cartoon lineup for every major network and recite all the dialog from every Star Wars film — yes, even Jabba’s.

So because I mad missed this test I had to go in during lunch time and take it. I don’t even know why I bothered going. My plan was to write “Brazil” on the big one, “Argentina” on the one below that, and see what grade that got me.

When I walked into class, my teacher, the lovely Mrs. Macias, was the only person there. Her desk was at the very back of the room and after receiving the blank map I sat at a desk in the front of the room facing away from her. Mrs. Macias was one of the nicest teachers I ever had despite shouting “quiete ninos!” (quiet, children!) at me and my friends.

Stalling for time I got up to sharpen my pencil and on a shelf next to the pencil sharpener I noticed something I had never noticed before.

A globe.

Making sure Mrs. Macias was not looking, I did a fake yawn and stretched my arm out the way a freshman might put his arm around his date. But I wasn’t getting fresh — I was slowly spinning the globe so that South America was pointed directly toward me.

Mrs. Macias never got suspicious that I sharpened my pencil 20 times during that test. Every couple of minutes I would go back to the pencil sharpener and turn the handly slowly while cranking my eyeballs sideways to try and read another country or two. By the end of the allotted time I had a completely filled out map and one pencil stub.

I can’t say deciding what I would and wouldn’t learn helped me in school. In fact is was disastrous a year or two later when I ended up taking trigonometry and analytic geometry at the same time and my brain decided “you are never going to figure out the sine, cosine, or tangent of anything in life” and while it was right, my grades reflected it.

My wife and I are big fans of Jeopardy. We record episodes on the DVR and every few days we’ll sit down and binge three or four episodes in a row. It’s amazing how often the countries of South America come up. My wife says she doesn’t know why we didn’t learn those in school.

I know why I didn’t.