[ApK]

mldavis2, Schools attempt to expose children to a cross-section to hopefully find stuff that they like that they wouldn't have picked up otherwise. The book you dreaded reading is perhaps the same book that launched the kid in the next row on a life long love of reading. And they are apparently making reading, and many things, more interesting than when I was a kid. My kids come home singing about their spelling words...I HATED spelling.

ekster, yes sometimes an apple is just an apple, but oftentimes writers have reasons for choosing the words they choose, and learning to look for and appreciate those reasons is important. Be be open to the possibility that what you saw as "trying to find some meaning in something that had no meaning" was perhaps sometimes your own failing in not recognizing the meaning, and that that same lesson maybe made someone else in class appreciate the power of metaphor, or emotional import of word choice for the very first time.