No Habla Ingles

First off, a couple random things. Number 1, I realized that if I blog from my phone at work then technically I am getting paid to blog. Life long dream (that I've only actually had for like a month) finally realized. And second, I decided that instead of waiting for something interesting to happen and deprive you all of my blog until that happens (unlike Beth Cavender, I don't have amazing things like STD googlers waiting for me around every corner), that I would give you stories from the archive (aka my life prior to today) to keep you entertained. I assure you that all of these stories are true and exagerrated as little as possible. Here is the first of such stories.

When I was in high school, I was not the biggest fan of studying or doing my homework. Now that surely comes as a shock to all of you who know me as an extremely studious and hard working scholar today, however it is true. It isn't that I didn't like school, its that I felt as though many of my assignments were in fact a waste of time and that my life would be more productive playing NCAA football on the Xbox in my friends basement (Buske shoutout!). I still maintain that if I were to be hired as a football coach that I would be 100% capable because of the time I spent playing that game. Anyway, the point is I didn't like doing homework. The problem was, I couldn't just not do my homework otherwise I wouldn't get credit for the assignment and I would get in trouble with my parents. This was a lot more drama then I was looking for. So it became a little game of mine to try and get out of doing as much homework as possible while convincing my teacher to still give me credit for it. It is a rather challenging game, but lucky for me, I'm a rather clever fellow.

In my world geography class as a sophomore, we had to do these study guides every week over the section we were studying. I hated those things. They were long and time consuming and all around just pointless. Well I was sitting in class one day about a month into the semester when an idea came to me. After class I went up to my teacher and told him I had really been struggling to complete the weekly study guides. Knowing I was a bright kid, he asked me what I was talking about. I went on to explain to him that English was actually my second language and that for some reason the length and style of the readings were just overwhelming to me. I explained that I was very embarrassed about this and I had gone as far as to learn an American accent to cover up the fact that my native tongue was actually Hindi as learned from my father who was born and raised in India. I could tell that my teacher was having a hard time buying this, so I acted as though I was getting very upset and started mixing the three phrases of Hindi I know into my desperate pleas that he not tell anyone about my situation. I then apologized for my broken English, explaining I slip into it sometimes when I am rattled. I believe he thought I was about to cry when he finally told me that it was alright and that he wouldn't tell anyone and most importantly that I no longer would be required to complete the weekly study guides. Victory was mine.

I went the rest of the semester without doing a single study guide and received an A in the course. The teacher never spoke a word to me about what we talked about that day after class. Just for the record, the three phrases I know in Hindi are roughly translated, "You are a donkey" and "You are a dog" and "Your mother is a cow." I learned them when I was visiting my dad's family in India when I was six years old. The best part about the whole situation? There actually was a student who legitimately had English as their second language and when that student asked the teacher for the same treatment I had gotten, the teacher refused to believe him, and even chastised him because he thought the student was making fun of me. I would have felt bad for this kid but he knew English just fine and was just trying to get a free ride through class. Who does that?