Why You Should Love Your English Class
5 MINUTE READ • OPINION
When you meet someone new, inevitably the question comes, “What do you do for a living?” to which I proudly answer, “I am a high school English teacher!”
More often than not the response is—“Ugh! I hated English, it was my worst class” and, then –“You’re so brave teaching high school!” No one understands how truly frustrating these responses are to me. They don’t understand that the English classes you take give you the tools to be successful in everything you do and that high school students are highly underrated and act like adults when you treat them as adults.
I have always wanted to be an English teacher and have never regretted choosing this career for one minute of the many years I have been doing it. Not only has it provided me with a living and the ability to connect with so many wonderful students, it has also allowed me to impart important life skills that help students far outside the classroom.
English Classes Make Effective Writers
High school English allows you to put to good use all the preparation your elementary and middle school teachers gave you. With your grammar lessons, vocabulary lists, spelling tests — they have given you the foundation you need to be an effective writer. Your high school teachers then show you how to develop these tools to become an effective communicator out in the world. In the high school English class, you get to read and write on a more adult level. You are learning to communicate with your world. Just as you are not like anyone else, the people you are communicating with have their own unique style.
English Classes Open Your Mind to New Ways of Thinking
By reading different authors, you are being exposed to different points of view and by writing about what you read, you are demonstrating your ability to understand and picture what another is wanting you to see simply through the use of words. I have often heard English classes being described as being forced to read the writings of a bunch of dead old guys.
Look at it another way—these people were the voices of their generation, writing to and about that generation. Our writers today have evolved from these “dead old guys”. Shakespeare might be hard to understand today, but when he wrote, it was for the common man of his time. He wrote about societal issues that we still see today—teenage rebellion, social injustice, discrimination.
Did you know that simply using “you” vs “thee or thou” in Shakespeare’s time indicated a huge gap in social status? Imagine how Shakespeare would feel being plunked down in our society these days where the word “bad” can sometimes mean “good” and we go around calling people “Dude”!
English Classes Make Effective Communicators
Most English students complain that writing is so hard and so difficult to know how to do.
WHAT????!!!
Writing is simply “talking” on paper and then tailoring your language for the intended audience. I have sat down with students who have made this complaint and we have turned a conversation into a functional piece of writing. The secret is to imagine that your reader is the most clueless person in the world and then set about making sure that clueless person has all the information they need to be as informed as you. Easy peasy!
I can go on forever about how important becoming a successful English student is to your life, how adding to your vocabulary should be a lifelong pursuit, how reading can take you away to places you couldn’t even imagine because, after all, English is my passion. But I will leave it here and hope that this brief glimpse into how English classes lead you to better life skills.
I will leave you with a quote from the venerable Nelson Mandela: “Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savour their songs.”
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Lisa Privitera
Lisa Privitera has been an English Language Arts (ELA) instructor at Grad Solutions for many years. She also has a keen eye for detail and is an excellent editor and writer. As you can tell from this post, she clearly loves what she does as an instructor, she loves her students, and she loves English!