A boy came into the peer tutoring class at my daughter's middle school looking for help on his Spanish I homework. The teacher turned to the two native speakers in the class and asked them to help. They happily agreed.

"What do you need?" one of them asked.

"Well," said the boy, "I don't understand how to conjugate these irregular verbs."

"Say what?" the two answered. "We have no idea what that is."

My daughter, who is making an A in Spanish II but is far from fluent, took a look. "Oh, yeah," she said. "This is what you do. Basically, you just have to memorize these ones that aren't like the others."

And that's how she became this boy's Spanish tutor. This made me laugh. Kids who speak Spanish can't teach it, but a kid who doesn't speak Spanish can?

We don't teach speakers of Spanish how to write, read and speak correctly in their native language until maybe high school or college -- if ever.

And apparently, we don't teach them enough about conjugating verbs in English that it makes sense to them in Spanish, too.

I've been told that this lack of correct Spanish is a pretty big issue for Spanish-language media, which often ends up passing over American employees in favor of people who have studied Spanish in their home countries the way that we study English.

It's too bad that schools in the United States can't teach native Spanish speakers about the structure of their own language while also teaching them English. Maybe if we did that, we could also teach Spanish to the English-only masses while they are still young enough to absorb new languages -- in elementary and middle school, not beginning in high school.

Ours is one of the few countries in the world with such poor instruction in foreign languages. Don't you think that should change?