A Life in English: Why I Teach the Way I Do
Some people come to English as a subject. I came to it as a world.
I was the kind of child who disappeared into books. Not occasionally — completely. Fiction, history, science, mythology — it did not matter. If there were words on a page, I was gone. I remember finishing the last page of The Return of the King before my twelfth birthday and sitting very still for a long time, not quite ready to come back.
That is the kind of reader I was.
The Language That Never Let Me Go
What fascinated me was not just the stories — it was the language itself. The way a single sentence could carry weight, precision, ambiguity, beauty, all at once. The way grammar was not a set of rules to follow but a system to understand — a machine with moving parts that, once you could see inside it, gave you extraordinary control over meaning.
I was fortunate to attend a grammar school in Kent where that fascination was taken seriously. My A-level in English Language was less an exam and more a homecoming — finally, a structured framework for something I had been feeling intuitively for years. The difference between syntax and semantics. The history of the language. The way register shifts with context. I loved every second of it.
University gave me something different: the discipline of academic writing. The essay as argument. The paragraph as unit of thought. Learning to write with clarity and rigour under pressure is a skill that never leaves you, and I am grateful for every deadline I ever missed and every draft I ever rewrote.
From the Classroom to the Boardroom
Then came the real world.
Working across corporate finance, the music industry, fitness, and hospitality over the past several years taught me something that no classroom fully prepares you for: professional English is a different language.
Not different in grammar — different in purpose. In a negotiation, words are tools. In a client meeting, register is everything. In a management context, how you phrase a request determines whether it gets done. I learned to write emails that moved people to action, to present ideas that landed cleanly, to navigate difficult conversations without losing ground or losing the relationship.
My passion for English did not fade through any of this. If anything, each new context sharpened it. I kept pulling at the thread.
Why I Teach
All of this — the childhood reading, the academic training, the professional experience — is what sits behind every lesson I give.
I am not a teacher who learned English to teach it. I am someone for whom English has been a lifelong companion, and I find genuine joy in sharing that with my students.
There is nothing quite like the moment a student lands a job they had been working towards for months, and writes to tell you that the interview preparation made the difference. Or when a young student earns the exam score they need and heads off to a university they once thought was out of reach. Or when someone who struggled to express a complex idea in a meeting comes back and says — I said it exactly right, and everyone understood.
Those moments are why I do this.
Every student I work with brightens my day. Their ambitions, their progress, their frustration when something does not click and their satisfaction when it does — I care about all of it.
What This Means for You
If you are reading this, you are probably someone who wants more from your English. Maybe you want the job. Maybe you want the promotion. Maybe you want to feel genuinely confident in rooms where English is the working language. Maybe you just want to understand the language more deeply — to see inside the machine.
Whatever brought you here, I want to show you what is possible.
Book a trial lesson and let's find out where your English can go.
Rudy teaches Business English, IELTS / TOEFL preparation, Pronunciation, General English, Interview Skills, and Professional Writing. All lessons are personalised and built around your specific goals.