One of the problems you mentioned in passing--swapping books for study guides. Instead of a joint discussion of important works, literary appreciation has been over-bureaucratized into endless writing of dissertations that the student, depending on the teacher and bias, hopes will strike the right chord with how that teacher thinks of th…
One of the problems you mentioned in passing--swapping books for study guides. Instead of a joint discussion of important works, literary appreciation has been over-bureaucratized into endless writing of dissertations that the student, depending on the teacher and bias, hopes will strike the right chord with how that teacher thinks of the work. Such guides, while vanilla, offer the "conventional wisdom" on what and how to appreciate certain motifs and ethos. It comes down to grades. If grades were handed out based on contributions in joint discussions, maybe students could enjoy the read instead of fulfilling the bureaucracy. (FROM MY SECRET ARCHIVE OF WHAT I HATED ABOUT SCHOOL AND READING ASSIGNMENTS.)
Yeah. I always suck and still feel stress over interpretations. I feel like there is only one right way to interpret and i will be punished/scolded if i saw things differently. Not to mention that i could interpret the thing in multiple ways and then have a sort of analysis paralysis because i don't know which interpretation was the right one.
Not to mention my teacher was always telling "the author is meaning X" when talking about the creation. Thus it crystalised that there is only one way to interpret the thing. Though i always in my head asked them to cite the author saying that they are meaning this in their creation or the ghost of the author facepalming themselves because the author didn't mean that what the teacher said they did.
Also, dunno if it is a real or fake story, but apparently an author participated in the national exam where there was interpretation of their own work. The result was that the author didn't know what the author meant.
So I think in school it is more that you need to say and see things how the system wants you to see and it can be hard for the people who refuse to lie about what they actually see.
One of the problems you mentioned in passing--swapping books for study guides. Instead of a joint discussion of important works, literary appreciation has been over-bureaucratized into endless writing of dissertations that the student, depending on the teacher and bias, hopes will strike the right chord with how that teacher thinks of the work. Such guides, while vanilla, offer the "conventional wisdom" on what and how to appreciate certain motifs and ethos. It comes down to grades. If grades were handed out based on contributions in joint discussions, maybe students could enjoy the read instead of fulfilling the bureaucracy. (FROM MY SECRET ARCHIVE OF WHAT I HATED ABOUT SCHOOL AND READING ASSIGNMENTS.)
Yeah. I always suck and still feel stress over interpretations. I feel like there is only one right way to interpret and i will be punished/scolded if i saw things differently. Not to mention that i could interpret the thing in multiple ways and then have a sort of analysis paralysis because i don't know which interpretation was the right one.
Not to mention my teacher was always telling "the author is meaning X" when talking about the creation. Thus it crystalised that there is only one way to interpret the thing. Though i always in my head asked them to cite the author saying that they are meaning this in their creation or the ghost of the author facepalming themselves because the author didn't mean that what the teacher said they did.
Also, dunno if it is a real or fake story, but apparently an author participated in the national exam where there was interpretation of their own work. The result was that the author didn't know what the author meant.
So I think in school it is more that you need to say and see things how the system wants you to see and it can be hard for the people who refuse to lie about what they actually see.