This happened in my art class once. Our kooky art teacher invited an ex-student in without any prior warning and we were supposed to ask him questions on his art (he did book covers).
Silence, no one was having this shit. Out of pity I asked him questions on some tiny details I noticed on the spot. More silence, I ask about different tiny details. And so forth.
I’ve realised that there’s a large portion of the populace that are perfectly comfortable in excruciating silence if it’s not at their expense.
Just imagine this with the books I had to read in school. Yes, I would have read it, I’m a fast reader, so a bad book does not waste too much time. On the other hand, I would have no problems with grilling the author over the shit he or she wrote. Because basically every book we had to read for school was crap. There are so many good books, books that would spark interest and passion for reading more, but somehow they had selected the worst of the worst back then, aimed at making children reel in horror when they see books and vow never to touch a book again after school.
Part of it is also what they make you do to the book. I remember one exercise involving a book of our choice and of course I selected one I already liked at the time. The analysis itself tends to make a book a lot less fun.
Huh. I guess my experience was better I remember reading My Side of the Mountain and The Giver, among other things. Usually pretty decent reads though.
I read The Giver as an adult, and I can absolutely confirm it was good. I also recall the books I was required to read were pretty good, but I didn’t like them at the time because they were required.
I always assumed that the kid and the baby die at the end, but then I guess the author wrote a second book just to make everyone feel better.
There were actually four total in the series, but they’re not really direct sequels, just more stories in the same world.
I really enjoyed these books, I remember them to this day
You’re a good person ass-worm
Kids suck
Ugh, can relate. I love to read; I used to go through two books per week as a kid during middle school and high school. Not even just fiction, but non-fiction about topics that interested me like space and aviation. I even read books on my Palm Pilot PDA, well before e-readers were a thing.
So as you can imagine, I had an exceptional vocabulary compared to classmates. This had some annoying effects as well. Whenever I did written assignments for a new class with a different teacher, they’d always accuse me of either cheating or plagiarism. Because I was using way more ‘difficult words’ than classmates. A two minute conversation usually cleared it up; they quickly found out that I did in fact do the work and understood the assignment.
I don’t envy teachers today. Reading comprehension has declined sharply, and kids just don’t like to read as much as they did when I was young. Despite the fact that books are now way more accessible to them. I fear it’s going to result in an illiterate generation…
I read everything I could get my hands on (and still do), except the shit they assigned us for school.
I get “historically relevant” classics are a thing, but students don’t want to read most of them because they’re brutally formal and none of them can relate to them. It’s a chore primarily because the curriculum is all old and because burying 500 layers of symbolism into a story isn’t how people write any more (because it sucks).
If more reading assignments were stories written to actually entertain kids and just asking the kids to put themselves in the character’s shoes and “what would you do”, maybe they wouldn’t hate reading so much.
At some point I started dialing up the symbolism interpretation up to 11 but somehow they didn’t like that either. I came to the conclusion that they want you to validate their particular interpretation of a work even if it put too much thought into it compared to the author, not put too much thought into it yourself.
I remember my teacher being upset about “official” interpretation. She called it out as over the top IIRC and then still taught it to us, because it was required on exams.
Middle School sucks ass for everyone who’s not a rich kid.
Nah, in my school, it was the rich kids who got beat up. School just sucks for everyone.
Source: was middle class and generally had an okay time
