Books school has ruined (1 Viewer)

[nwatts]

I enjoy reading texts then ripping them apart. I read Anil's Ghost in EE1 crime before studying it, went through a pretty detailed analysis, read it again and enjoyed it tonnes more than earlier. When I read I naturally take note of language techniques and this and that, which (to me) make books/films/poetry all the more enjoyable.

I can't even read older poetry without going back and tearing it to shreds in order to figure out why it's so good.

The only texts I intentionally try to read on a simpler level are stuff like Harry Potter which don't have much to offer from a literary perspective, but are enjoyable to read because i've immersed myself within their worlds since I was little. Sentimental value. I often find some very exceptional novels can provide for readers who are after a deeper reading, as well as those looking to browse over the surface. Something like To Kill a Mockingbird offers such a scope, which is probably why it's so acclaimed today.

 

[nedzelic]

everything

ender's game

school has probably prohibited me from ever enjoying any poetry. specifically it has given me a thourough hatred fro sylvia plath and a desire that she had finished the job when she was 10; not 30-something

 

[midnight_magick]

Cloudstreet.
A novel I would have thoroughly enjied if we hadnt analysed the hell out of it.
Romeo+Juliet.
We were watching it in year 9 or 10 and the english teacher kept stopping the movie every five minutes.
But then again, without the help of english there would have been some texts i would never have understood.


Edit: "enjied"? what the hell is that? i meant "enjoyed"
Edit again: oops, sorry, r+j (the movie) isnt a book

 

[starbaaa]

I think I liked pretty much everything I studied. It made me sad when books that I really liked were despised by others because they were made to study them. Ones that come to mind are The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Yr 9), To Kill a Mockingbird (Yr 10), and Emma (Yr 12). It was funny with To Kill a Mockingbird, because during the summer holidays I'd gone second-hand book shopping, found To Kill a Mockingbird, read it, loved it. Then went to school, and the first english lesson of yr 10 we were told that we'd be studying it. I was overjoyed, and did really well at that unit. The teacher was annoyed because she didn't think anyone would have read it, and had a lot of predict-what-happens-next activities planned.

 

[Kyroth***]

I've actually never had a text ruined by english. Ever.

Firstly, I've never studied a text that'd I'd previously seen/read. Heard of, yes, but not read.

Secondly, call me weird, but I really like being able to annalyse a text. I love being able to actually tell why I like/dislike something. Though with ruining watching movies, my view is that if I'm not captivated enough to be paying attention to nothing else, its probably not that good, and deserves to be analysed. But seriously, reading Harry Potter again, I can actually see WHY I like it, why I don't like certain characters, things like that, and I love it. The worst bit is when I don't like, or only like a bit, a movie, and I talk about it with my family and friends, I sound a bit like a film critic, and it can annoy them.

Oh, and btw, I did study Harry Potter, in year 7. I don't think it's a bad thing at all, to study it, as long as it's done early (ie, before kids have a bad analysis experience) and well (so its not boring). I think its great, because it gets more people into the books. If I hadn't been made to read it then, I probably be one of those people who thinks its stupid and will never read it, out of protest, and so would many of my friends.

 

[luscious-llama]

The Heart of Darkness..for EE1 Year 11.
Now we can relate just about anything evil to the heart of darkness that lies within mankind....bwahahaha..

 

[frangipane]

Year 10 english destroyed me. I've never been able to watch Bend it like bekham or pleasantville again... i guess its not a bad thing that we can watch a film and understand it on a deeper level but i reckon it was fun being able to just sit there and enjoy the movie without the need to think

 

[insert-username]

English has ruined nothing for me, because everything we studied was pretty crappy to begin with. Thank God...


I_F

 

[kangarulz]

the only one for me was the other facts of life by morris gleitzman... lets say discussing sex with the english teacher (the principals wife) in my first term of year 7 scarred me for life... reminds me of the time in year 9 when we were in pdhpe and learning sex ed and the whole putting condoms on bananas thing.. she walked passed the window and was like "making fruit salad are we today"
shes scarred me for life ever since

 

[smegger_em]

I don't really get why people hate analysing films, saying they 'just want to watch them.' Analysing a film is just watching it intellignetly, and what is wrong with that? No one says they wish they could just walk around rather than having to walk around intelligently.

Someone used the example of The Truman Show and said 'the shot of the beach is just a shot of the beach.' Which is a strange attitude to take I think - I mean Weir didn't put that in their because he thinks beaches are pretty or becuase he needed to fill in some time, he put it in there for a reason. That is the way the I always look at films - every shot costs money and takes up time, the dirrector has to have a pretty good reason for including it. Everything is deliberate. Its the same with things like costumes - if someone is wearing a red dress, that was a conscious decision.

But I suppose, I am an English nerd, I love it, so I am coming from a different persepective to some other people. Pulling apart novels and films is one of my favourite things to do - its like a code or a puzzle to work out, and the prize for figuring it out is a more enjoyabel reading experience.

Hmm, just read that back and realised how nerdy it sounds. Can anyone tell that I am going to be an English teacher?!

 

[BlackDragon]

school has ruined all the maths and science text books for me... I just can't read any of them anymore. A tragedy i know.
I can't even read the classics of school literature anymore. Such as the canoncial oxford dictionary, the macquarie thesaurus, and even the world encyclopaedia.

DAMN YOU school, damn you to hell.

 

[jhakka]

school has ruined all the maths and science text books for me... I just can't read any of them anymore. A tragedy i know.
I can't even read the classics of school literature anymore. Such as the canoncial oxford dictionary, the macquarie thesaurus, and even the world encyclopaedia.

DAMN YOU school, damn you to hell.

Lol.

Having said that, please don't spam in my forum.


Any book I would consider ruined would have ones I didn't like on the first reading anyway (Emma, My Place, etc.). Pretty much everything from senior English except The Real Inspector Hound was pretty dodgy even before I had to analyse it.

Junior English is way more fun. There's more room to be creative and more focus on the content of the book rather than all the implications and hidden meanings.

 

[lengy]

PD James for Crime Fiction. That standard book was horrid at the beginning so I didn't end up finishing it and dropped Crime Fiction even though I enjoyed all the Crime Fiction films we used to watch with Humphrey Bogart etc.

 

[toadstooltown]

I don't mind analysing texts, but it's when we're forced to analyse really big and profound texts through this key-hole module. Even worse is when the teacher doesn't know what they're takling about.

In year 10 we did the matrix at the end of the year and it was not necessarily ruined for me, as I was already over it, but certainly stopped me from ever watching it again. Apart from smooshing every religious notion into the movie that there could be (there is some religion, I do admit, but it's also a sci-fi action), the teacher hadn't even seen it before class. That's right, it was her first viewing. She asked a friend and me "Is it almost over?" when morpheus hadn't even been captured yet. NOt only that, she tried to pretend like she understood it. "Neo's entering the matrix now", she chimed the moment he was touching that goopey-mirror thing and *leaving* it.

Or in year 12 adv when we were doing Kubla Khan by Collerige and had to pretend that Xanadu is a mythical place, Even though it's a geographical city in Mongolia...

Oh well, never have to do that again. Being able to analyse is good, so we should analyse texts seperately, not under the umbrella of some obscure module.

 

[phatic]

Bah, I deeply loathed English. It's good to be able to understand texts better, but the excessive analysis is horrid. In year 10 my teacher didn't even get through one reading of the poetry (for the sake of aesthetic appreciation) before tearing the poor thing to shreds. And then there was the HSC... Hours of the teacher's monotonous voice droning on about techniques... Ack.

I quite liked BNW though.

 

[walrusbear]

it's seems bizarre to be opposed to the 'analysis'
it's like saying you like the numbers of maths, but not those damn algorithms

is the course suppose to be just viewing texts and writing that you 'enjoyed' them??
analysis can be dry and can be difficult, but it's good for the brain and what english is all about

 

[BlackDragon]

it's seems bizarre to be opposed to the 'analysis'
it's like saying you like the numbers of maths, but not those damn algorithms

no the hell it is not. do you know anything about maths? "those damn algorithms" are the maths. numbers are nothing. mathematics is the relationships and patterns of numbers. not how someone "'likes numbers' but just can't stand the way they get destroyed by those silly algorithms" (in girly voice).

 

[walrusbear]

and english is similarly about studying language and meaning

 

[^CoSMic DoRiS^^]

Cloudstreet.
A novel I would have thoroughly enjied if we hadnt analysed the hell out of it.

hahaha yes...when i read it over the christmas break it was like "omg *orgasm*" coz it was so good...and then by the time we were done...ugh, i never wanted to hear the words "unity and connectedness" ever again.

 

[toadstooltown]

it's seems bizarre to be opposed to the 'analysis'
it's like saying you like the numbers of maths, but not those damn algorithms

is the course suppose to be just viewing texts and writing that you 'enjoyed' them??
analysis can be dry and can be difficult, but it's good for the brain and what english is all about

Hardly. If anything it'd be liking the algorithms but disliking proving the basic of number theory every freikin' time you counted. English is like maths in the respect that it takes something complex and breaks it down into small parts, each of which plays their part in the whole. The difference is that with maths is that there's hardly any ambiguity and we don't have to guess what this part's there for, it just intrinsically is. With english there's a limit to how much thought and what meaning was meant from it. Even if we know their context, there's still a limit to how much we can know, yet they pretend it's endless.