The most fun thing about English is that you get to discuss a lot and you get to talk about different ideas and different books and movies and really anything that has a story to it. The hardest thing about English is grammar, knowing when you’ve made a mistake and how to fix it, and then also writing essays. The easiest thing about English is that if you just talk a lot and you love to talk and like the sound of your own voice, that is probably going to be a pretty easy course.

A typical lesson looks like learning about technique or some sort of common thing you see in stories, in poetry, and then looking at examples of that, so stories, books, and other books. For novels I recommend, well, for high school I would recommend reading a lot of classic books like Animal Farm, maybe even something in Shakespeare. But for newer books, I would say The U Give is really good, and a lot of good dystopian novels and fantasy novels.

English is important because you use it every day. And even when you graduate high school, and even if you think you’re never going to use it for example, people that go into trades you still have to learn how to write an invoice and respond to emails; you have to learn how to communicate clearly. And even though English is a lot of reading, it’s a lot of writing.

The benefits of English include that there are millions and millions of people across the world that speak it; most of the standard language is English, and so even if you speak another language, English tends to be in many cases the same. Regarding disadvantages, if you’re learning English as a second language or third language, however many languages you know, it’s actually probably one of the hardest languages to learn. English doesn’t have a lot of rules; a lot of languages like Spanish and French and Japanese, once you know the rules, it’s really easy to learn. When it comes to English, it never really follows its own rules. So I would say that’s a huge difficulty, at least in learning English. Disadvantage: there’s not a lot of disadvantages. I would say learning a language is always something that’s good for you, but only knowing English, I think, is for a lot of people.

One downside in English class might be reading a really boring book. I tell my students all the time: you get to choose what you read. Find something you love to read. You read every day; you just don’t read things that you like to read.