Unlike my middle school Spanish class, these two semesters of Spanish counted for a full two years, fulfilling my foreign language requirements. I had a lot of fun in the class, largely because we often had parties, rarely had tests, and generally learned what we needed to learn when we needed to learn it. Each semester, we gave a presentation on a Spanish speaking country and some social,cultural, or political topic as a checkpoint in our Spanish skills. The entire presentation had to be written in Spanish. Here is my first semester presentation:

Self-defense was my favorite class this year. We trained in a collection of martial arts that centered around a focus on aikido, using an opponent's strengths against them and locking joints up. Aikido enables even smaller people, like myself, to take down a much larger foe with no more effort than to take down a small foe, if executed correctly. However, my favorite forms are jodon tsuki shiho nage and one-armed shoulder throws. While the former is an aikido form, the latter is a judo form and takes a substantial amount of energy to execute. I've been getting stronger this year however, and I can now easily throw someone my size or even a bit heavier clear over my back.

This was my second-favorite class, tied with Spanish. While most of my friends had a strong aversion to identities in trignometry, I enjoyed doing them. They were more like riddles than actual math and the mind squeezing was, unusually, fun. Solving a riddle was a lot more interesting than solving a math problem and it kept me at the problem with far more determination. Ultimately, it proved to my benefit to enjoy identities, because it helped me pass several tests with A's. I also must credit a good deal of success to an excellent math teacher, professor Villalobos.

In second semester, I returned to finish up my pre-calculus courses by taking the course, "Pre-Calculus". The irony... I cannot say that pre-calculus was nearly as fun or as easy as trignometry. In fact, I liked it a good deal less than trignometry. However, it still was not too hard and I have so far passed all of my tests with A's. It is my hope, that I pass the last test with an A, because if I pass all four tests (I've passed three so far with A's) with A's, then I do not need to take the final. Fingers crossed, and hopefully I can squeeze by this semester.