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.
This is a great example of why I think the common argument that schools should teach “fun” books is flawed. For many people, the thing that turns them off books is not some poor choice of books (“if only the school had taught better books I would have become a life-long reader!”) but it’s the act of teaching itself. Some people just don’t like school!
To be clear: that’s okay with me! Not everyone likes school. I loved pretty much every book I read as a kid, and this would have been true with or without school. But I don’t expect everyone else to have the same experience.
Honestly, this kind of thing probably would be great if it was taught with a listing of books that the kid can choose from, and do a self-guided exploration of a text that interests them. I had a high school English teacher do that, and I chose Slaughterhouse-Five, which I ended up really loving.
My 10th grade (ages 15-16, for any non-Americans) English teacher did a unit like that. She chose 4 or 5 books with similar themes, and we all gave her a ranked list of the books we were most interested in. She broke us into groups based on those lists (and, I assume, some other criteria from her knowledge of us individually) and each group read a different book. I’m pretty sure each group did a little presentation on the key themes and she sort of helped us see the similarities and differences in approach. It was a really good unit.
She was an amazing teacher. I had her in 12th grade (ages 17-18), too, and I’m pretty sure I at least appreciated every book she taught, even if I didn’t love them all.
My school actually did this exact thing. Hunger games was still relatively new (the series wasn’t finished) and for summer reading we all ready to kill a mockingbird and then could choose from three other novels (including the hunger games) each of the three had some similarities to to kill a mockingbird (spectators and Justice) and we were split into three groups by chosen book for the first few weeks and essentially taught the class about our book. It was extremely effective cause here I am more than a decade and i Remeber it.
I think the way the teachers teach also matters a lot. I loved doing novel studies with good teachers, but I was miserable doing them with my high school English teacher(small town, so same teacher for all grades). She was one of those teachers who marked us based on how much we agreed with her, and did some other stuff that made me feel defensive before the novel studies even started.
When you get one teacher who grades like that, it can ruin future teachers for you as well, because there will always be anxiety about being punished for having the “incorrect” opinion that stifles a persons ability to have fun and be creative.
I don’t know how much I would have even picked up on that if it weren’t for my grumpy jerk college lit teacher who gave me average marks until I wrote a scathing paper tearing apart a novel study that pissed me off and got the best grade I’d ever had lol.
I had a teacher in school who told us at the start of the year that around Christmas we would be asked to bring in a book we were reading at home and tell the class about it. There was no judgement when we brought the books in with some books ranging from suitable for ages 8-18, I think I was about 12 at the time and brought memoirs of a geisha
I started reading when I was about two, picking words out of books, magazines and newspapers (according to my mother, anyway) and I was reading Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe and I don’t remember what all by second or third grade. If we’d been in class together, we’d have given that poor teacher a heart attack!
I think that many teachers over analyze books. For teenagers this requires more patience than they have and they decide they hate reading.
That’s literally the goal though. What else can teachers do? They’re supposed to teach critical analysis through books. It’s a school subject - they’re not there to teach you to enjoy a hobby. Kids get bored with math too, but they still gotta do it.
As a literature teacher, this. Lots of kids hates maths, but no one is going out of their way to tell the maths teacher to make it more fun… Meanwhile, everyone has an opinion on something I spent years of my degree studying - what’s the best way to teach kids to analyze and understand literature?
Parents, other teachers and principals… Every single one has an opinion.
The way things are going though, we’ll be reading picture books with ninth graders in a decade.
Sorry but the maths example is wrong. The subject is irelevant, it is allways about the teacher. I have more fond memories about subjects I did’t like that much that had a good teacher vs a subject that in itself would interest me, but taught by a bad teacher (boring, unfair or psychopatic). Some kids don’t like any subject, but if the whole class hates maths then the problem isn’t with the kids…
Reading is school doesn’t need to be “fun”. Critical analysis of texts is an important skill schools have to teach. All true.
But it can and should be done in a way so that it doesn’t kill the joy of reading in general.
I absolutely hated reading in school while being an avid reader in private. I hated every single book I had to read in school.
Except Kohlhaas.
Only far later I realised why. It was because we had a competent teacher in that year and the analysing part wasn’t done in a vacuum like with the other books. We even had to reenact parts of the book, which I hated even more than reading the other books.
But because I understood the intention of the book and the analysis tasks, it didn’t cause me to hate the book.
Teachers far too often completely fail or outright neglect to convey the reason to their students why to learn a certain topic.
Honestly I think the whole “kill the joy of reading” thing is a myth. You for example continued reading in private even when you didn’t like reading in school. That’s a reasonable thing for someone to do if they like reading. No one who’s into movies will stop watching them after seeing a couple bad ones. People who hate reading because of school assignments never had much love to lose.
In any subject teachers should try to make things as fun and engaging as they reasonably can, but not doing so doesn’t excuse being a bad student.
My teacher who made us find the symbolism in nearly every sentence of The Great Gatsby made me absolutely hate English class.
I didn’t read many books before 7th grade. Before that it was comic books and my parents magazines. Seventh grade really opened up a new world. We had these wonderful anthologies from adult books, plays and poems along with a record that would have a celebrity reading a work of poetry. Since I watched a lot of movies that my folks did I was familiar with some of the authors and actors on the record. This was back in the early 70s btw. So there were brief pieces of stories that would illustrate a point or some sort of literary devise. If I liked a story or author, I could look at the publisher notes and pick out who I wanted to pursue. This started my love of reading. I never went after ap courses because “circumstances” but never quit loving to read. Maybe not being in classes that had to pick apart books was better for me, idk. But that’s how it worked out.