Middle school Spanish class was a blast. I was two rows from a window, with a clear shot into the courtyard. Between the window and me was a girl whom I probably had a crush on. (Ok, so I did.) Let’s call her CrushGirl.
Basically, Spanish class taught me to multitask…”If I’m going to be looking out the window, I might as well fawn over a cute girl while I’m at it.”
Spanish homework was quite easy. It wasn’t supposed to be, but it was taken only as seriously as each student decided to take it. Lucky for me, I picked up Spanish well and homework was simply an exercise in efficiency.
With the homework, it was usually some fill-in-the-blank series of exercises. Like a drill sergeant, each exercise was grouped and systematized.
For example, you might have a group of six questions where you simply insert each section’s verb conjugation – always in the same order in each section. Those same answers might appear through twenty sections in your homework. You might simply have to write “Yo,” “Tu,” “Es,” etc, over and over and over, twenty times for the first part of each question.
The next blank after Yo-Tu-Es, would be whatever verb was there for the section – that’s where the real thinking came in.
Well, CrushGirl and I would often race to see who would finish their homework during class, first. (Charming, I know.)
And she always won.
And I hated it.
And then I figured out what she did.
First, she would simply go through each section and write “Yo,” “Tu,” “Es,” etc. With that knocked out, it was just a matter of filling in the rest of the blanks.
I, on the other hand, would write “Yo,” then the conjugated verb, then move to the next question.
I followed “the rules”. I worked in series.
She broke “the rules.” She worked in parallel.
As simple and seemingly insignificant as it was, she always won.
Always.
Comments