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.
I don’t remember the book we had for one English class, but I HATED it. As in I never finished it, took the fail on all the assignments associated with it, and wrote fanfiction during class instead of paying attention to anything my teacher said.
I checked out when she was trying to force some bullshit symbolism that honestly wasn’t there and decided that if we didn’t think the way she did, we were wrong.
I tested like a champ though, so I still graduated with great marks and extra credits.
I found out in college that some professors love allegory, symbolism, conceptualism, figurative correlations, and when I started incorporating it into papers, I started getting the As I’d never gotten before. It blew my mind. The second magic elixir was “sources” and throwing in quotes (albeit very good ones).
It changed my game completely. But it also taught me how to write. To this day, I sometimes take night classes or something to keep improving myself and I end up writing a paper that I"m actually proud of, all because I thought I had figured out how to play the game, when in reality, maybe critical thinking actually clicked haha
Oh absolutely!
But sometimes the curtains are just curtains and it’s nothing more than scenery.
Symbolism and high school are tricky. Some teachers don’t understand it well enough to teach it, and even when they do, students are apt to misunderstand it greatly.