Written by Dr. Stanley Schmidt with the intent to make the English language come alive with lots of humour, clear explanations, and silly illustrations that stick in the mind. The student will learn to think and to communicate effectively while also learning often little known but interesting facts in the areas of geography, history, music, science and much more.

Begin Teaching is the second book of the Life of Fred Language Arts Series, which covers English for high school students.  The titles are:

• Life of Fred: Australia
• Life of Fred: Begin Teaching
• Life of Fred: Classes
• Life of Fred: Dreams

These books are designed to make the reader THINK! Each of the 19 chapters in each book is a daily lesson. There are about four pages about the adventures of Fred and a Your Turn to Play. Each Your Turn to Play consists of about three or four questions. After all the questions are answered, then take a peek at the answers that are given on the next page. Don’t just read the questions and look at the answers. You won’t learn as much that way.

Topics Covered are:   Ellipsis, Litotes, Meter = 39 inches, Ninth way to make plurals, Since can be ambiguous, The whole point of English, Green’s Theorem in Space, Consonants as defined by air flow, Location of a comma changes the meaning, 14ºC = 57ºF, What the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar have in common, Eleven ways to make plurals, 5 cm = 2 inches, Run-on sentences, Comma splices, Appositive phrase, Conjunctions, Lyrics, Iambic foot, Pentameter, Trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic feet, Scansion, Twelfth way to make plurals, Three ways to fix a comma splice, Eager vs. anxious, Not looking at the spelling of a word to decide whether to use a or an, Long vowels, Twenty-two words that don’t contain a, e, i, o, or u, Idioms, Affect and effect as verbs, Affect and effect as nouns, Nouns defined, Lie vs. lay, Transitive and intransitive verbs, The Australian Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act, Pronouns defined, What some people “know,” Making “happy as a clam” make sense, Scare quotes, Sixteen ways to make plurals, Cardinality of a set, Numbers—when to use words and when to use numerals, Subject-verb agreement when there is a compound subject, When to use du and when to use Sie in German, Literary symbolism, One hundred best first lines from novels, What is means to be a graduate student, Should the saying be, “The early worm gets eaten”? Dictionary vs. thesaurus, Conjugation of a verb in three tenses, Existentialism defined, The three cases in which a preposition is capitalized in a book title, The two numbers in English (singular and plural—I and we) and the three numbers in Russian, Six tenses in English, Correction: 12 tenses in English.