Finally, my guess is that the Spanish emphasis on ñ as a separate letter has to do with teaching how it has a separate position in the localized collation sequence, doesn't it?
You'd have to ask Mr. Gonzalez. I suspect he may have taught that way less because of his Castellano upbringing, and more because of the infamous lack of sympathy of American high school students for the fine points of usage in foreign languages.
If you look at Wikipedia, it says: “El alfabeto español consta de 27 letras”. The Ñ is separate from the N (and so is it in my French-Spanish dictionnary). The accented letters, however, are not considered separately. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfabeto_espa%C3%B1ol (I can't tell you how annoying to type "ñ" is when the tilde is accessed using AltGr + 2 and you have to combine that with the Compose key and N to obtain the full character. I'm sure Spanish keyboards have a better way than that :-)) Regards Antoine.