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 had this one particular assignment that made me loathe Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
The assignment was a chart with about 15 common themes/topics (black & white, birds, women, etc) and you had to mark down five to ten examples of each theme per chapter. This was impossible for some of the chapters as certain topics just did not come up at all, not even in a metaphorical way and when I asked about what to do in those cases I was repeatedly told to just ‘figure it out’ or ‘yes there are look closer’ (even though multiple students brought it up). I swear to you some of the topics were so niche that this was literally impossible, so I began to hate the book because of this stupid assignment.
Now that I’m waaaay into the future I realize it was a common theme for the teacher to assign assignments like this where you were better off just making stuff up to actually pass than trying to do it correctly. I haven’t reread the book but I’m sure it’s a fine book, I just had an awful teacher.
I understand the sentiment that teachers need to be paid more, but so many teachers are not really teachers, they’re just people with a job, like the one you had, who are actually dangerous to the health and wellbeing of the students. I despise that kind of teaching. It’s the kind of teaching that turns you off of education. Some people are just toxic.
Although it’s one of my favorite books, it’s not meant for that kind of analysis for first read, especially in high school. There’s too much to unpack, which Ellison did purposely and maybe that partly explains why it was the only book he published.
Anyway, yeah your teacher should’ve hit the high points and kept it moving. You probably would’ve thought that it was amusingly weird if nothing else.