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.
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.