The Things I Say

As an English tutor, I get paid to have discussions with students who are learning English as a second language. In order to facilitate these conversations, we often both read the same article before class. Then, the student can choose from a question pool to indicate what they would like to talk about in more detail.

Sometimes, the students ask for my opinion on various subjects, in order to have another example of how someone might answer these questions, or for listening practice.

Here are the answers I provided to some of these questions earlier this morning.

If you could go to the future in a time machine, when would you like to go visit? What is the reason?

I don't want to see what happens in my life, because I am afraid that I won't like it. So, I want to go far, far in the future. Maybe I will set my time machine to go visit 2222. I hope that I will find a peaceful, highly intelligent, very technologically advanced world of caring humans with cool gadgets. I would be devastated to find a desolate planet that humanity had ruined.

If you were to go back to the past, which period would you like to go to? Is there anything you want to change if you can? Why do you wish so?

I would want to visit the Regency Era in England. This time period is from about 1810 to 1820, and it is when the rich people in England had so many fancy society parties. I would want to be rich and wear beautiful dresses and go to balls, like I was in an episode of Bridgerton or a Jane Austen novel. There isn't anything I would really want to change about that time, and I would probably get tired of it after a while because it was before electricity.

As far as going back in time to change something, I think I would go back to 2016 and help stop Donald Trump from being elected President of the United States.

Oh, and while I was there, I would make sure to buy myself lots of Bitcoins.

(This next one is from a different class, with a much younger student.)

If you were to get a set of LEGOs as a gift, how would you feel?

I think getting new LEGO sets is really exciting, and building the LEGOs makes me happy because I can see the LEGOs come together to make something new. It is very satisfying.