David Weir :v_enby:At my high school (one of them; the last one I went to) we had a dedicated fiction library and librarian. It was where the nerds hung out; I was there every day. But I regret I never accepted any pointers about what to read.
Similarly I had a fantastic English teacher in S4 and S5, who was an expert in feminist Scottish literature (adult me now thinks this was very cool). But it always felt my (frankly uninspired) choices of independent reading weren’t good enough: could I find some interesting textual analysis angle on The Hobbit aged 16 and write 3000 words? Probably not. But by then my reading was all non-fiction, reportage and the like, and my school did not approve of using that for final examinations or submitted coursework.
I’m really grateful to that English teacher, their teaching is why I love quoting poetry to my kid and why I agonise over phrasing when I write papers. But I wish someone could have met me where I was with my reading interests and shown me how to develop.
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