When people ask me what I do, my mind goes blank for a split second, then overloads.

If I want them to shut up and move on to the next person, I say I clean houses. If I want them to call me ‘Ms. Smarty-pants,’ I say I write poetry and study architecture. If spring is here, I say I do landscaping and gardening. If they catch me in the mood, I say my life is my career. All true, mostly simultaneously.

But usually, I just say I teach English.

Given that response some people, upon seeing my Asian heritage, and learning I do not hold an Ontario Teaching Certificate and grew up with seven siblings, assume I wake up at 4am each morning to teach the ABCs to screen-raised toddlers in China. Well, that is not exactly how the story goes. I was promptly fired from several educational companies each time I was told to give trial lessons. So no, curious stranger – that is not the kind of English I teach.

Some time ago it struck me that English is more than just an language, as is Spanish or Hakka or Zulu. They all have their own cultures and histories and backgrounds, yes. But English goes one step further. Through its ubiquitous usage and forced relevance onto people who might rather not be involved, it represents access to the international stage, provides a common meeting ground for interpersonal communications with people who look and sound different, and is the only assortment of letters and sounds you and I (such privileged Westernized individualists as we are) use to reach the greatest number of people without translators.

If you are fluent in English, you can work, you can socialize, you can be a person in this brave new country you have immigrated into. Unless you find people who share your mother tongue to build community with, English is a must. No English, no life. It is not enough to learn it as a new language, slipping it into your backpocket as a rainy-day skill — it is your very ticket to the world.

That is not exactly the English I teach, either. Closer, but not quite.

I teach highschool English essay writing, I elaborate to our imaginary nosy stranger (or distant relative) — argumentation, rhetoric, written communications. The course may help students get into the higher echelons of society; they may have a harder time embarrassing yourself over run-on sentences and awkward phrasing; they may find themselves able to understand passages and authors and thoughts previously impenetrable to them.

But beneath it all lurks this thought — that ‘English’ is more of a concept that is lived and breathed for members of Western society and less of a skill to be learned. And the concept runs deep into the human spirit, and flows from it.

Parents come to me with their hardearned cash in one hand and their children’s hand in the other, and ask me to “teach them to write and read better.”

What my soul hears is: “Help my child communicate with their fellow human beings. Help them know what they are made of, what came before them, what it means to be an individual within community, and why it matters that they care.”

For many, that is what good English is — the mastery of linguistical thought-capture. It is not the learning of a language but the becoming of a literate soul.

That is the English I teach.

That is the idea of English.

Fun sidenote: I wanted to major in English before I realized linguistics is actually a field in itself. I wanted to study language and nuance and meaning, not Austen and Shakespeare. (Not that I personally hold anything against them.) Then, being the vague-minded teen I was, I picked communications at the end…