Hating the Past: Foreign Language

If you are apart of the we are in America, speak English crowd like me, you probably loathed forced language classes in middle school and high school.  It's always more challenging to learn things you have no interest in, but foreign languages are nearly impossible to learn when you not only don't care but are fundamentally against the course itself.

In middle school I took two years of Spanish for the first time and hated it.  Year one was rather basic and my teacher was moderately attractive so blow ups were few and far between.  Year two Spanish was rather annoying because my Spanish teacher doubled as my homeroom teacher.  You can imagine how annoying this might be.  I didn't really care for her and I put up with alot less shit then.  It was obviously bad seeing her twice a day especially when Spanish class seemed to overlap into homeroom. We had it out a few times.

On the first day of class we were told that we would be picking Spanish names to replace our real names for class.  The teacher would call us our Spanish names and it would be fun!  At least that's what I now suppose the idea was.  This did not go over well with me.  My name is Kevin.  Not Carlos. I'm American and not Spanish.  I'm also not Chinese and named John that would be weird.  So the teacher hands out a list of names and tells me to pick one off the list.  Per usual I suggest something off the list.  "Can I be Magglio?"  "No please pick a name off the list."  It would have been cool to be Magglio Ordonez, but I'll settle for Carlos Lee I thought.  This was well and good for a couple weeks until we had to start writing our Spanish names on our tests.  So after the first test didn't go so well, I didn't want to play her games anymore. 
"Carlos, can you write this sentence on the board?  Carlos doesn't answer.  Carlos, can you write this on the board?
"My name is Kevin.  I don't want to be called Carlos anymore." 
"Everyone in my class goes but a Spanish name."
"Why?  This isn't Spain, this is America and I'm an American and I want to be called by my real name" 
"These are the rules of my classroom, and everyone seems to follow them but you.  Now please write this sentence on the board."

This is paraphrased because my memory isn't quite that sharp but stay tuned for Part 2 of the story know as the Pete Rose incident.