pangurbanthewhite:

phalloid-destroyer:

whoneedsoptimism:

You know what really fucking bothers me about school in general?

It took away my passion.

Before high school I loved to read. I devoured books over and over, stayed up reading with a flashlight when I needed to know what happened next chapter, cherished every book and refused to crack their spines.

Now I can’t remember the last time I read a real book. In English class they would assign us Great Gatsby and Frankenstein and Heart of Darkness and Grapes of Wrath and I couldn’t bring myself to read a single one. Too many things to do, not enough time. Reading became a burden, not an escape.

So I just stopped. I stopped reading every second I had free time. I stopped picking up books in the bookstore. I gave away half my collection. I keep saying “I’ll get back into it soon” but it’s been years.

I stopped reading because I was being forced to read books I wasn’t interested in, and now I’m being forced to read 200 pages a week from textbooks to not fail my classes. I stopped reading because school killed that passion.

This is the exact same experience i had with reading.

I can pinpoint the exact moment this happened to me and it was in 11th grade, when we were forced to read The Scarlet Letter, which is a hellishly bad and boring book, and also when we were given our weekly test on it, we were asked, I shit you not, “what month does The Scarlet Letter take place in”. This was a fact mentioned once, on page 1, and this was enough for our teacher to think it should have been a gimme question. So for that book and every book after through high school and college I read like I was trying to memorize the whole damn thing because as far as I knew I might have to. 

I am slowly starting to recover my love of reading but my god it has been a torturous slog and I blame her specifically for that.