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.

  • whisperingelk@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • BurnCityThugz@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • noctourney@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.