Comment on Australians, especially men, are reading less than ever before
DeviantOvary@reddthat.com 2 days agoWe had that basically from the first grade of primary school. Each month a new book. It started with just summarizing the text, then gradually went from writing what you think the moral of the story is, to giving a full breakdown and analysis. 12 years of that, for the books I found mind-numbingly boring, that I ended up weaseling/cheatig my way through most of it without even reading. I remember giving my best to try read through the entire Crime and Punishment, but giving up 1/3 into the book. All the classic literature—just not for my brain.
Didn’t help that while my primary school teacher had tried to cultivate my creative writing (45 minute, graded assignment), my secondary school teacher was a snob who graded me lower just because she “didn’t like my style”. God, I hated school, lol.
I still like reading modern fantasy and some other genres, so there’s that, but school almost completely turned me off from reading.
Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 2 days ago
We had to read the Illiad and I gave up after 5 pages. I just cannot be bothered to read when it’s all writen in such weird prose. Achilles being called 3 different names on the first 2 pages. Fuck off with that. And then when we went through it with our teacher she asked what kind of wood Achilles’ ja elin was made of. Like what?? How is that fucking relevant. But I do still to this day know it was aspen (I think that’s the correct translation).
DeviantOvary@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Illiad was in our curriculum, too. But I think the worst I gave a shot to were the few works from my country’s literature several centuries old that literally over half had to be translated to the modern language for us to understand. It was exhausting to read.
Lol, thanks for reminding me of something with the Achilles bit. We have state exams at the end of 12 year education that are also a requirement for college admittance. There are (were?) two levels of difficulty. I took the higher one. But the lower one had an especially egregious question. It was so controversial, it ended in newspapers, was debated among teachers and politicians alike. The question was which color a certain character’s ring was from a book we had as required reading at some point in school. Something, as you can imagine, absolutely irrelevant to test in the final state exams (which test knowledge of the four high school years on multiple subjects).
School systems nowadays suck so much for so many reasons.
Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Oh yeah our finals also have lower or higher levels. Except for slovene (the main language) which is only on the higher level. And is usually the worst one since Half the grade is a long essay which is of course graded subjectively and there are a lot of parts like pronounciation and other shit which literally cannot be solved 100% correctly since you would have to know the whole dictionary.
DeviantOvary@reddthat.com 2 days ago
Howdy, neighbor 😁 Matura is such a joke, lol.