As my Thai students struggle with English and put forth little effort, I’m reminded of my days studying high school Spanish. I was terrible at the language, always frustrated, and did the bare minimum to get by with a B. I retained a few sentences and random vocabulary words, but I haven’t yet been in a country where my limited skills were necessary. I can sympathize with my students in this way, but Spanish is not English! While English is a difficult language to learn, especially with how different it is from Thai, it holds so much more value in our society. Maybe if I had a specific purpose for learning Spanish, other than the fact that it was a required course, I would have tried harder and done better. It’s why I push my students to recognize their own purpose in my classroom, and realize how lucky they are for the opportunity to learn English at such a young age.