I don't think I've told this story

[amelia_petkova]

During his senior year of high school, my younger brother's English class was reading Hemingway (I can't remember which novel). I haven't read any of his novels myself, but I do know that his readers often turn out to either love him or hate him. When the teacher asked my brother's opinion on the novel, he said, "I don't like it very much. It isn't really interesting."

The teacher then tells him [almost original wording]: "That's because you're reading it wrong."

Granted, it wasn't quite "You're interrogating this text from the wrong perspective," but it was close enough to make me collapse into laughter at the dinner table. And no, the teacher isn't Anne Rice. Even though my brother attended a Catholic high school.

*headdesk*

Comments

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

That sounds like good advice. Hopefully there were more relevant choices in there. I recall being given many reading lists which simply had nothing at all of any interest in it. Once I had a literature class which covered every short story in the book - except the one story I actually liked!

In retrospect, I think this is because most of my lit teachers, at least until college, were middle-aged women, and they tended to select literature which they found interesting. There being a world of difference between a middle-aged woman and a teenage boy (also a world of difference between an actual teenage boy and the common conceptions thereof, especially those held by middle-aged women), the selected literature simply wasn't all that interesting.