Letter to students

Dear students,

As your teacher, my goal is to help you to prepare for success in life. Wherever you go in the future, you will at some point be faced with a task in which literacy will be required. You'll have to write a cover letter for almost any job you apply for. Unless you have a lot of loose change, you'll have to read tax forms and fill them out. You might want to find out about about the best place to go on your next vacation. You can show your appreciation for a gift through thank you notes. These are examples of literacy needed in daily life. Studying English helps you prepare for these, but it does a lot more.

Literacy in the study of English is no easy feat. There are an enormous variety of genres to deal with: poetry, non-fiction, essays, novels, short stories, poetry, plays, and journalistic works. Each of these must be approached in a different way if you want to understand them. In literature an author frequently doesn't tell you everything straight up, so you have to be able to sense their tone. For example, if you read Jonathan Swift's “A Modest Proposal” without being able to recognize satire, you might think that this brilliant author was actually a lunatic trying to convince Irish people to eat their own children! To be able to recognize tone like this, you must develop your literacy skills.

Studying English can help you increase your writing skills so that you might not have to send out a hundred and two emails to your coworkers before they finally understand what you're talking about. Through literature you can be exposed to a variety of cultures and experiences that might spark a lifelong interest or a travel dream for you—maybe after reading The Spire you'll be struck with a desire to visit the incredible Salisbury cathedral in England.

I don't want English to be just a school subject for you. Find books that you enjoy or are interesting. Talk about them with other people. Reading can be difficult sometimes, but you can get better at it, and if you work at it by improving your literacy skills then it will be worth it. Literature can change your life!