To the Editor:

One year when I was teaching English as a second language at Southern Regional a student came to me for help with an assignment from her Grade 10 English class. The class was reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the teacher assigned an essay explaining which character was the hero and which was the villain. I thought the assignment was rather difficult, especially for an ESL student who had only been in the U.S. for 1½ years.

But, you know, my Mexican student was able to explain to me the definition of both “hero” and “villain.”

June 21, 2017