this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Ugh, can relate. I love to read; I used to go through two books per week as a kid during middle school and high school. Not even just fiction, but non-fiction about topics that interested me like space and aviation. I even read books on my Palm Pilot PDA, well before e-readers were a thing.
So as you can imagine, I had an exceptional vocabulary compared to classmates. This had some annoying effects as well. Whenever I did written assignments for a new class with a different teacher, they’d always accuse me of either cheating or plagiarism. Because I was using way more ‘difficult words’ than classmates. A two minute conversation usually cleared it up; they quickly found out that I did in fact do the work and understood the assignment.
I don’t envy teachers today. Reading comprehension has declined sharply, and kids just don’t like to read as much as they did when I was young. Despite the fact that books are now way more accessible to them. I fear it’s going to result in an illiterate generation…
I read everything I could get my hands on (and still do), except the shit they assigned us for school.
I get "historically relevant" classics are a thing, but students don't want to read most of them because they're brutally formal and none of them can relate to them. It's a chore primarily because the curriculum is all old and because burying 500 layers of symbolism into a story isn't how people write any more (because it sucks).
If more reading assignments were stories written to actually entertain kids and just asking the kids to put themselves in the character's shoes and "what would you do", maybe they wouldn't hate reading so much.
At some point I started dialing up the symbolism interpretation up to 11 but somehow they didn't like that either. I came to the conclusion that they want you to validate their particular interpretation of a work even if it put too much thought into it compared to the author, not put too much thought into it yourself.
I remember my teacher being upset about "official" interpretation. She called it out as over the top IIRC and then still taught it to us, because it was required on exams.
Maybe not illiterate.
But I run into a lot of people who are incomprehending, and too proud to ask for elaboration when they didn't get what you said or wrote.