Comment by vidarh

I just refused. I had good enough grades that I could afford to actively sabotage those lessons with passive aggressive responses that let my teacher know very well by the end of it what I thought of the whole thing.

I found it quite interesting that I was the only person in that class who regularly both read and wrote poems, and at the same time the one who had the sharpest reaction to being forced to analyse them in ways I felt actively destroyed my enjoyment of those poems.

One of the highlights of my school years was during this torture, when I got a chance to read a poem I'd written during one of those lessons aloud, with the intent that we would analyse it.

The teacher walked right into it, not yet aware how much I detested it.

My poem was a scathing criticism of tearing poems apart to invent meanings, unsupported by facts, that the author likely never intended, just barely civil enough to be read out in school.

My teacher got red and mumbled something I think nobody in class heard over the cheering and clapping.

I don't think I ever want to perform any of my poems again - it's a hard reaction to beat.

My teacher and I reached a cautious detente - he didn't punish my grade as much as he could have for that and other demonstrations, and I contained it and mostly played along. But the following year we did have to do a major report that included a literary analysis of a novel, and I told him flat out that I knew I could afford to come out a full grade lower and still not drop a grade for my final grade of the year, and that I just would ignore substantial parts of the requirements.

I did all of the 'mechanical' analysis of vocabulary and identifying allegories and the like, but then flat out refused to speculate on what the text meant. That was purely demonstrative - I certainly could have talked about my subjective interpretation, but the exercise in pretending there was an objective interpretation just made me upset.

It did not just affect my enjoyment of reading, but also my enjoyment of writing - the thought of my writing even potentially being treated like that was profoundly depressing.

To this day I think these kinds of lessons are destructive and do massive damage to students enjoyment of literature.