What's the point of required reading?

I actually loved having required reading back in high school. I was pretty much the only one in my class who genuinely enjoyed it, so I’d constantly get into deep discussions with my teacher about the books. I think I drove him a little crazy sometimes with all my cynical takes 😂
He was always pretty lenient with me, even when he knew I hadn't finished something just because I didn't feel like reading it 😁
He was honestly such a great guy 🙏

I had this incredible English teacher back in high school, so... if you hadn't actually read the assigned books, there was absolutely no way you were walking away with an A or even a B. Personally, I’d usually land a B myself, but I was totally fine with that because my teacher was so tough yet brilliant—she was easily the most popular person on campus. A total legend.

She still shows up at every single one of our high school reunions! 👍

I went to a vocational high school. My teacher was actually visiting from the liberal arts department, and she didn't mince words on day one: she told us the curriculum for trade schools was absolute garbage because they were going to force the exact same heavy lifting on us as a fancy prep school. 🙂

It goes without saying that a school like that doesn't exactly attract the kind of bright kids who give a damn about the subtle nuances between ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian verse. Honestly, most of them wouldn't care if their lives depended on it. We practically bled onto our homework assignments and reading logs. Especially freshman year. Hexameters, spondaic meter, stressed vs. unstressed syllables, heptameter, blah blah blah. There wasn't any shortcut where you could just Google a summary and write some obvious crap about how a Google comment explains how wealth inequality creates social divides. Nope. We had to take a full test for every single book.

Sophomore and junior years were way more interesting. Senior year was the best, in my humble opinion. *The Catcher in the Rye*, *Crime and Punishment*, *For Whom the Bell Tolls*, *The Metamorphosis*—stuff like that. I actually enjoyed reading those.
We got lucky with Anna Karenina. We watched a miniseries on TV instead. I already knew she was going to throw herself under a train, and I knew it wouldn't happen at the very end of the series. Since trains kept showing up as a motif in basically every episode, I spent half the time just waiting for the moment she finally jumped.