What a program actually is
A list of instructions, followed in order by something extremely fast and extremely literal.
Imagine writing down instructions for making a cup of tea, and imagine that the person following them is unusual in three ways. They are extremely fast. They have never made tea, or anything else, and they never guess. And they do exactly what the instructions say, in the order the instructions say it, without once wondering whether that is what you meant.
You would write differently for that person. "Boil some water" is not enough, because they do not know what boiling is or where the kettle lives. Every step has to be spelled out, in an order that works, using only words they already understand.
That is programming. A program is a list of instructions, written down for a computer to carry out one at a time, from the top of the list to the bottom. The computer is the fast, literal, unimaginative helper. Nothing in it wants anything or notices anything. It follows the list.
Why not just write English
Because English is full of gaps that a human reader fills in without noticing. "Leave it to cool for a bit" is a perfectly good instruction to a person and a useless one to a machine. How long is a bit? A programming language is a much smaller and much stricter language, built so that every instruction has exactly one meaning.
The language in this course is Python. It has a few dozen special words and some punctuation that matters, and that is nearly all of it. You already know far more English than you will ever need to know Python.
Here is a program. It is one line long and it does one thing: it says something back to you. Press run, then change the words and press run again.
Change the words between the quotation marks to anything you like, then run it again. The quotation marks mark where the message starts and stops, so they never come out in the output themselves.
Now a program with more than one instruction in it. Read it before you run it and decide what you think will appear, and in what order.
Move the last line up to the top and run it again. The computer will happily pour water over tea that is not there yet: the order is entirely your responsibility.
Your instructions for making toast say: put the bread in the toaster, spread the butter, press the lever down. What will the literal helper do?
Exactly that, in that order: bread in, butter spread on cold bread, lever down. It has no sense that the butter step is in the wrong place, because it has no idea what butter is for. Getting the order right is part of writing the program, not something the machine helps with.