Spanish 101

My hopes for valedictorian were pretty much in ruins after the first quiz I took at Godby. My high school diploma was in jeopardy after meeting Kurt Goerke in Spanish 101.

Kurt and I met in Ms. Howell’s Spanish class our freshman year. We became fast friends and until facebook he was the only classmate I had kept in regular contact with throughout the years.

Kurt and I had many things in common: sports, music, comedy, no hope of passing Spanish, and parents that probably wished they had stopped at two kids. Both of us had older, over achieving siblings that set an academic bar much higher than we would ever reach.

In class, Ms. Howell assigned each student a "Spanish" name and mine was Ramoan. Kurt shortened it to Moan and I had a nickname, a name that many friends and their parents know me as today.

Spanish 101 was a two-semester class, but I cut my losses and bailed after failing the first semester. My first "F" at Godby. Ms. Howell seemed very surprised and disturbed that I could do so poorly in a basic Spanish class. I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t doing so well in my basic "native" English class either.

I think Kurt salvaged a "D," but he also dropped the class after the first semester.

Our next stop, by clever design, was Ms. Goforth’s Home Economics class (it was the only class we could both get into.) By the end of the first week we were the only two with assigned seats. Opposite sides of the room, facing away from each other.

I hated the Spanish class and never took another foreign language class. However, in Spanish 101, I met a lifelong friend, had a lot of laughs, and was able to walk out of class every afternoon that first semester to the friendly smile of Senior cheerleader Marlene Williamson – my first high school crush…