It happens often that one is sitting during lunchtime in the Tent Plaza, eating naan with their friends and socializing without pausing to check their watches. Out of nowhere, someone calls from across the table, “What do we have in 10 minutes?”
There is a pause as everyone considers the question, and then someone shouts back their reply. Sometimes, the answer is English. Some perk up at the sound of it, while others lean back heavily in their seats and groan.
However, it is worth pausing for a moment to think about the importance of this subject, that many believe contains no real value to life outside school. To learn more about this challenging topic of discussion, I sat down and interviewed Mr Jasina, an English teacher here at Dover Campus. He thinks that the subject helps “empower students to share their voice and opinions on different matters and issues which are important to them.” Taking descriptive writing as an example, it forces us to express emotions in an abstract way, which can further help refine our thinking about the world around us, and the relationships and conflicts that are present in our lives.
Some of us might not find English as interesting just because it is not our native language. However, it does play an equally important role in everyone’s life, in Mr Jasina’s opinion. According to Mr Jasina, through reading, we can develop the skills of empathy and kindness. It also helps us gain a perspective into the socio-political issues that exist in our society. He thinks that it is something we don’t always have time to reflect on in our fast-paced society but reading enables us to do that. As the world is on an inevitable path towards globalization, English is essentially the world’s “lingua-franca” - which I’m sure many people will agree with - and it helps people from different backgrounds come together and communicate with each other. At the same time, it doesn’t mean that those who aren’t native speakers of English need to focus on English only. Their native language is equally - if not more important because it is their identity and it represents who they are.
As we think about leaving school and university, we tend to question the usefulness of what we have learnt in a subject and its applications in our life in the future. One simple thing which one should develop is the love of reading. Mr Jasina mentions that wherever you are and whoever you are with, you can always have a book by your side. It doesn’t matter how you’re feeling, or what you’re doing, or who you’re with. There is always a book out there written for us and somehow, even though we don’t realize it, we are always looking for it too. People have favourite authors and books because they are the ones with which the readers can connect the most. When others disagree with you, you will find that there is someone in the world who understands and sees things through your perspective, even if they aren’t physically near you. Reading helps us look at the world through a different lens. Even as you go into your professional life, it can be helpful as it provides you with knowledge and helps you gain a better understanding of what you want to know.
What we do in English as we go through High School can be classified into two broad categories: reading, and writing. Both help us develop important skills that are useful to us later in our life. Reading between the lines is a powerful skill that we develop as we practice searching for the explicit, but also deeper, more implicit meanings in a text. Writing in different forms is another applicable skill as we write regularly in our daily lives, be it a letter, a legal document, or even a narrative. Narrative writing is an especially important one because many of us often assume that writing personal accounts or storytelling is something that we don’t need in the future and that we have no use for it. However, it can be used, for example, to explain an event that might have occurred in detail. If you have to give reasoning about whether to hire an employee or not, you often do storytelling to explain what you think. If you look closely at the variety of adverts and commercials on television, in the newspaper and on notice boards, you know as Mr Jasina states that, “nobody sells a product anymore, they sell a story.” Even the internet is nothing but a series of stories told through websites. As human beings, we conceptualize the world through narrative structure, as it is a natural way of categorizing information in our brains. Storytelling can help us with memory, learning a new language, and of course, interpersonal skills.
He says that students commonly dislike the subject because they don’t enjoy the things that are done in English. To maximize one’s learning in the subject, one needs to find something that one enjoys. You need to find some sort of motivation - whether it is a book, an activity, debating or something else. I think that this is true for every subject and in this way, one can maximise their time in High School and in their life beyond.
Mr Jasina mentions that English in its nature is a very collaborative subject and that in your professional life, you are judged on what you produce rather than your individual performance. Almost always, the product is a result of collaboration. He thinks that if we can learn to leverage our strengths as well as that of others, we can produce better work that can help us professionally through our esteem and building stronger relationships. Building relationships and being able to contribute to something is extremely important, as he claims that, “the people who are most successful in the world are the people who benefit from the generosity of others because they have [shown] generosity to those people.”
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