One evening, I wanted to look up some video game on Tv Tropes. Two hours and twenty open tabs later, reading about christian symbolism in anime I was struck with sudden realization. What I've been doing at that point was EXACTLY what the teachers were trying to force me to do throughout six years of middleschool and highschool. I used to hate that shit! And I was far from alone with this attitude. Polish classes* were notoriuos for being boring, derivative and complete wastes of imagination. Interpretational analysis (particularly of poetry) was the worst. It consisted of finding hidden meanings where there weren't any, using the same couple of keywords to describe every literary work ever made and trying to guess which interpretation the teacher had in mind. It wasn't hard as much as it was insulting. It took me five years to recover from this trauma and discover that comparing, analyzing and categorizing fiction doesn't have to be a chore.
What happened is this: polish teachers took an activity (trope hunting) that people do voluntarily on their own (and very much enjoy) and with the use of chalk, blackboards and ancient academic terminology turned it into a form of punishment and an object of derision. How could they screw it up so badly? It's understandable that kids hate math - you have to put in some effort first to enjoy it. But literature, culture? Everyone absorbs it one way or another, and nearly everyone talks about it sometimes. So to make it this awful requires special kind of teaching skills. If they can keep up this level of incompetence, they can probably stop teenagers from having sex just by making it a mandatory class.
*to any of you nonexistent non-polish readers: I'm polish, so polish class means basically literature class
