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 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.
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.
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…
My teacher who made us find the symbolism in nearly every sentence of The Great Gatsby made me absolutely hate English class.