BH

There has always been a definite backlash among students of in school
reading. “You’re ruining the bok for me,” “Stop talking about
themes!”. Most of the time, I join in the whining, but that’s just
because if we cry enough they’ll usually stop teaching and let us go
to sleep.
School didn’t ruin reading for me. Most of the time the books sucked
to begin with, but I didn’t allow that to cloud my belief that other
books were quality. In the case of good books, though, I’ve never felt
that the discussion ruined it. I’ve often felt that there was a moron
leading the discussion, or my classmates weren’t able to talk about
the actual important things.
In fact, the elementary-level thematic discussion in most of my
English classes has just whetted my appetite for an actual example of
themes and motifs and stuff in books. Usually, after I read a book
for myself or for school I open up Sparknotes and Wikipedia pages
about it to try and dig into ideas that neither me nor my teacher had
thought of.
Even though I often find that the way we read in school is completely
wrong, often focusing on boring or simplistic books that are chose for
all of the wrong reasons, the fact that we have discussions has
probably positively affected my consumption of other books.
It can be very frustrating when I’m not sure how to go about finding
these things, but it’s better to be irritated than ignorant. I’d be
happier if teachers actually taught how to locate and discuss such
things, but that seems to be asking for way to much in this school and
I’ll just look on the bright side on this one.