Loving a language, but not too interested in the courses my college offers

I’ve been studying Spanish since the seventh grade and I’m currently a sophomore in college. Although my spoken Spanish is not the greatest (it’ll undoubtedly improve once I am able to study abroad in Spain), I would say I have a very strong grasp of the language. I conducted my first meeting with my Spanish major advisor all in Spanish and my advisor seem very impressed (I’m sure he encourages all his students and says similar things, though).

I have not decided what I want to do for work after college, but I’m seriously considering teaching English in Spain for a year or two and then coming back to the U.S and teaching high school Spanish. I truly love the language, have a passion for learning languages, and would love to be able to hopefully pass my passion onto students.

Obviously while learning any language you are forced to learn the culture of whatever people speak it, and while I enjoy passively learning about the history, literature, etc. of Spain, I really don’t have any interest in some of the classes I have to take to complete my major. I get that it is what it is and I hate to complain, but I could not care less about classes about short stories in early 20th century Spain, or contemporary female writers of Spain, and I don’t feel like they’re entirely useful for what I want to do as a job. Again I know it’s important to know the culture of the language you’re learning and speaking and that’s it’s just a part of the process, but reading all of these random short stories is not going to better prepare me to teach high schoolers the foundations of Spanish and more conversational Spanish.

Sometimes having to take these classes discourages me from my passion for it, but it always comes back. I guess it could maybe come down to the fact that I’m not as interested in the academic side of learning a language (meaning that I enjoy learning languages to be able to meet people in different countries and make new friends, rather than learning the language with the goal of reading famous Spanish literature).

I hope I communicated my thoughts fairly well. I’d appreciate any comments / advice / opinions on this topic. And please don’t be mean to me if this sounds ignorant that I don’t care about things that are seemingly important. Thank you! :)

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