“I spent months working with student who was a teenage boy and not really interested in taking more English classes. In our first lesson, I could tell he was obviously playing a video game on a second screen rather than paying attention to the lesson. I began to talk with him about his favorite games, who his favorite streamers were online, and he shared with me that he had aspirations of becoming a game designer in the future. After that lesson, we completely shifted gears and I created a completely customized curriculum for a creative writing project. He created an original idea for an RPG video game, so we discussed game theory and design, analyzed different video game genres, researched various cultures for character design/world building inspiration, and give presentations in class about them. We also practiced conversation skills through writing game dialogue and acting it out, discussing the nuances of the language and how certain tones can convey different meanings, and comparing the differences between written and spoken English.”