Was spanish a mandatory class in your high school?

No, they don't have high schools here in the UK. We just have primary schools and secondary schools, of which there are several types, some private, some not. Compulsory education finishes at 16, at which point a person can either leave the educational system and find work, or go on to non-compulsory higher education.

Wow that is very interesting. Here we have kindergarten, then first grade through 12th grade. After we finish 12th grade we graduate and can either go to work or college. 16 is very young to be done with school and move onto college. I was considered young for my grade. I was 17 when I graudated pretty much everyone else graduated at 18.

Why did you not go to high school? Did you drop out? I am very confused by this. You said its because you are from the UK. Do they not have high schools there at all? Some schools have elementary schools, middle schools and high schools but when I was in school we just had a elementary school and high school. We went through all the same grades is just we didnt go to seperate buildings. The middle school was just part of the elementary school.

I'm not sure how many students were in our high school. Each grade had less then 100 kids in it and in our high school we had 7th-12th grade so there would have been approximately 600 kids in our high school. Wow that is crazy then that you had 3000 in your school. It must have been huge.

Thats neat that you had so many choices to choose from in your school. All we had was spanish. Ours was a very small school though I'm sure thats why. Are you actually fluent in french, german, italian, and czech or did you just have to take the classes and do good enough to pass? I cant imagine having to learn more then one language that would be so hard to keep them all straight. If you are fluent in all those I am truly amazed at your brilliance!

I'm fluent in French and can get around in Italian and Czech (if you dropped me off in that country I could rent an apartment, order at a restaurant, buy stuff at the store, etc.). I love German and I am part German ancestry but I have real difficulties with the language. In 1994 I was trying to buy a ticket from a machine in a train station in Austria, and if some Italians hadn't come along, I guess I would be there still. ;) I actually ended up living in all those countries, so it wasn't a bad deal, and I still have friends there and plan to visit again in a few years when the economy improves! I think the thing that really made my life easier in learning languages was a course I took in introductory linguistics, in which each day we were given a page of a language we had never seen before, three translated sample sentences, and a glossary, and we had to come up with at least ten different (and correct) grammar rules for each language. Thanks to that course, even though I can speak only a dozen or so words of a lot of different languages ("please," "thank you," "sorry, I'm a stupid American," etc.), I can tell you a lot about how certain languages (Arabic and Farsi, for example) work. We had almost 3,000 people in my high school so obviously they had to offer more choices.

LOL! Me too! I hated it so much it's amazing I graduated at all! LOL

Well the origami making is cool but I dont know what that has to do with teaching students spanish lol. That is something that the chinese do I believe. That belongs in art class not spansih class. I never really skipped school but my senior year I was kicked out of school more then I was allowed in school lol. Needless to say I was a bad teen and I hated school.

Well thats good that you could at least speak with a spanish speaking person living in america. I couldnt even do that. I cant speak a word of any other language. In our school it was just one year of a language and since there was only one language option it was Spanish that everyone took.

Its funny how we think we will never use the things we learned in school in real life but then down the road we do usually use the knowledge they taught us. Well I didnt pay much attention in school so I didnt learn very much lol. That doesnt help me very much in life though.

I would have skipped the exam to if it was only optional. I suppose the people who chose to take it were the ones who knew french really well and knew they would get a good grade so it would help them. But if you take the test and you fail it miserably that would just lower your total grade.

Yes if I wanted to move all over the world I would obviously need to learn another language to be able to speak to people who dont speak english. I dont plan to ever leave this country so I'm not worried about it. If I knew another language though I might be able to get hired for having that quality. I hated school I would have tried to get out of any classes I could have lol Spanish class was one that they couldnt force me to take so I didnt. If math had been optional I would have skipped that class to I was horrible at math.

I know that if I was to go to college I would have had to take a language in order to enroll. So its a good thing I never wanted to go to college or I would have had to take the spanish class in school. Thats awesome your spanish professor was handsome. Our spanish teacher in high school was the puniest little nerd. Ugh so gross lol.

Wow you must be very fluent in spanish if you had taken it for 5 1/2 years in total. That is really awesome that you stuck with it so long. The only one I know who did anything like that in our school was my exes cousin she went on to go to spain to be a exchange student. Usually our school got foreign exchange students which was really neat but no one usually left our school as a foreign exchange student in another country. Being able to speak another language would be very handy. I can only speak english.