I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.
My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
I'm a combined spanish/Spanish education masters student and yes, public school foreign language instruction in the US is fucked.
Classes are usually less than an hour which greatly limits the size of lessons students can have. Bush's children will be left behind act defunded schools so foreign languages got a cut.
A lot of Spanish textbooks they give out in these schools are too structured and also move too fast. The emphasis on memorizing and testing on grammar rules is just part of the ableist test culture pedagogy. Kids are naturally anxious and want to succeed but the foreign language curriculum is designed to only let the very top succeed while everyone else languishes behind.
Summer break also has a very negative impact (also other long breaks). Summer break should not exist (hot take I know) as it disrupts the educational flow and makes even more redundant work for teachers. Schools have ACs! But maybe with climate change kids wouldn't even make it to school alive anyway which is always a nice thought. Also in the US teachers don't get paid in the summer. Summer break is where the poor kids and rich kids get separated.
It really depends on your instructor. The Spanish teacher I had in my first year of HS was complete dogshit despite being a native speaker while my next two teachers were great (we even had a trans flag in our class).
My take is that grammar is literally just a booklet you give to students and you should just focus on cultural immersion and history. Spanish should be a slam dunk in terms of cultural study but the textbook companies and capitalist educators want to remake their same shitty textbook so they can squeeze more money from our schools.
Seriously they teach Spanish like we are CIA infiltrators who have 6 weeks to grind a language before dropping a golpe de estado on poor indigenous tribes.