When taking classes in school, you pretty much need to follow the requirements of the class, even if they don’t make perfect sense in your situation.

What would you do if you were taking a Spanish class as an adult and part of the exam was to discuss, in Spanish, what your career goals were? That is what the woman in this story had to do, but she was already in her chosen career, so she felt it didn’t really apply.

The teacher, however, couldn’t make an exception for her, so she decided to have a little fun with it. She learned how to talk about deciding between becoming a circus lion tamer or an assassin to her professor. Fortunately, the professor saw the humor in it and gave her a passing grade.

Read through the full details below to see what you think about this funny story.

What I want to do when I leave school – Spanish oral exam

I was taking Spanish lessons as an adult.

Learning Spanish can be very helpful in life.

We were learning towards the same exams taken in school at ~16 and so for the oral exam we had to study the same topics.

Part of the oral exam was ‘unscripted’ chat with the teacher which was fine, but the other part was on set subjects such as ‘what I want to do for work after leaving school’.

It doesn’t hurt to talk about this, even if it isn’t really relevant.

As I had been working for 15-20 years by this time, this held little relevance to me. As a class we asked the teacher if this could be changed to something more relevant.

She apologised but told us that the examination rules specified what subjects needed to be covered and there ws no allowance for deviation.

Let’s see what they do.

So I decided to have a little fun.

I learned the appropriate vocabulary (which I have forgotten now) and prepared my speech to say that I was undecided between two career choices.

I wanted to either join a circus and be a lion tamer or become a professional assassin.

I don’t see why they would fail her just for goofing around a little bit.

These chats were between the pupil and our teacher while being recorded for invigilation. The teacher grew more and more wary as the chat progressed, but once the recording was started had to go on with it.

As I was learning Spanish for my own interest, failing the oral exam would not be a major issue for me, so I was prepared to take the risk of having a bit of fun, rather than go through a pointless discussion of my long forgotten early career.

Good news, but not surprising.

Thankfully that was not a problem and I passed. I probably put more effort into learning the subject matter than I would have done otherwise.

This is a great story because there really was no bad guy. It is completely understandable that the teacher doesn’t want to make new rules for just one person. But it is also understandable that this student isn’t taking it 100% seriously.

In the end, she learned Spanish well enough for her needs, which is the main thing.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a student who was threatened after refusing an elective exam, so they took the case to the district.

Take a look at what the people in the comments have to say about the story below.

This is a good rule for most situations in life.

Don’t ever grow up!

Here is someone who loved this story.

I think this commenter is right.

Honestly, I bet the professor appreciated the humor compared to all the same boring conversations. This is the type of casual conversation that you might actually have in Spanish, so it shows that she really learned the language.

You really shouldn’t take yourself too seriously. Learning a new language is fun and useful, and it is clear that this woman got everything she wanted out of the class.