Literally any book that you now dislike due to school. This also applies to other literature styles as well.
Mine is The Hunger Games. I had to read it las year in school and it drove me insane. We started doing the novel study in early February and didn’t finish until May. I finished the book in less than two weeks, so I was pretty much just reading personal books all through English class for close to two months.
It’s not even like we had to analyze it super intensely. It was projects like ‘Make a playlist for a character of your choice’ and we had vocabulary tests every week, that were a joke. It was multiple choice for words like quest and forage. I know that English wasn’t everyone’s first language but come on.
I didn’t even like the book that much in the first place, so all of this was just adding to the misery.
Nope. I loved reading too much and had usually read the books before I had to read them in school.
I did end up hating Romeo and Juliet more than when I read it myself. I switched schools in 9th grade and had to read it twice and watch the Zeffirelli film twice.
Shakespeare can be rough if you are forced to listen to your classmates read out the words at a dreadfully stumbling pace.
But in general I’m with you, I have never understood why a great book becomes bad just because a teacher suggested reading it.
Maybe this is a hot take but I dont think Shakespeare should be taught in middle/high school.
Back then, understanding the message of the text was a the hard part and you miss out on all the good writing. When I got to uni and started reading Shakespeare on my own, I could comprehend it fine and really started to appreciate the prose and humor.
Had a classmate that read the ending of words with the ed ending as a separate entity unto itself. Never explained why. Teacher never explained why. It was just accepted. Still totally confused about what happened in that case. 10th grade regular level class, not honors level or anything like that. Kifd wasn’t very nice either, so it rubbed me wrong.
I still crack up thinking about hearing “what, Lucius, ho?” as “what luscious ho”
Shakespeare wrote content that was meant to be watched. It can be great to read it and discuss it, but it’s so much better when you just watch it.
I’ve read a lot of Shakespeare and R&J is one of my least favorites for sure.
I love Shakespeare. My mom had his complete works in pride of place mext to the family Bible.
I hated Romeo and Juliet. How stupid were these people? Romeo was as constant as the weather. Juliet was a child. Both their families were jerks. And killing yourself “for love” is just stupid. I kept laughing. I thought Shakespeare was being sarcastic calling it a tragedy.
My daughter was 16 when the Luhrmann version came out. We both loved it.
Thanks to moving to a school that turned out to have an incompetent English department, I ended up doing Romeo and Juliet about 4 fucking times with 3 different teachers. (Yes you’re doing the math correctly, one teacher did the same play two years on the run)
The second and third teachers were also the sort that go ‘analysis this text, but agree with my analyst 100%, and I’m not going to tell you how I analysed it’
The fact that the two massively disagreed gave me the impression that analysing text is completely fucking pointless and effectively ‘the curtains are blue because they had to be a colour’
I’m still awful at analysing sections of a text. Though I’m pretty good at overarching themes, manly because that’s what the first teacher covered.
She gave me my favourite reading of Romeo and Juliet. The romance is completely set dressing. The real message is how blood feuds are stupid. It’s never actually stated what either family has against the other. If they just stopped fighting, Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t of had the ‘forbidden attraction’ and either would of never of noticed each other or would of only been interested in each other for a few days. Instead they felt the need to keep it a secret, get married in secret and 7 people died and both families lost all male heirs.