Anon reads a book for school

Imagine bullying someone because they read a book.

They should be thankful the school didn't punish the class for not doing the assignment.

I was home schooled,* and occasionally I wish I had gone to public school, because I missed out on a lot of cultural touchstones, but then I'm reminded that kids are fucking horrible to other kids at any sign of differentness, and I was a fat, nerdy, gay bookworm, so, yeah, I'm good with the way things shook out. Haha

*Got a great education, not a religious nutjob, was not raised by right wing zealots.
- Home schooled kids on average are smarter. Public schools tend to lower their standards to get a certain percentage of students to pass.
  
  Plus I bet your teacher was hot.
- As a homeschool survivor, you're the exception not the rule
Imagine bullying someone because they read a book.

Because anon was different. He was the only one who read the book. That's why.
- And that works with everything:
  
  only rich kid
  
  only poor kid
  
  only athletic kid
  
  only non-athletic kid
  
  It literally doesn't matter what the metric is, if you're different, you'll be punished.
- Maybe also because he made them feel dumb as they didn't have the expected knowledge. So they took revenge for their fragile egos.

I'm sorry anon but they probably were gonna bully you regardless

It's Anon's parents fault for not teaching him how to deal with bullies.
~~You should talk to them and explain that what they are doing hurts your feelings!~~
Yeah no, fuck up the next guy who calls you ass-worm, bite and scratch if you can't knock them down, make sure they remember that fucking with you bears consequences. Push a stick to their asses while you scream "ass-worm, huh?!"
- Yup. Took my kids to an anti-bullying session at the local karate school, and while their presentation was a bit more mild, it had the same impact. Basically:
  
  fists up and be loud
  
  block any attacks and push them back while also being loud
  
  (implied) if they don't stop, let 'em have it (they taught some kicks)
  
  This applies as well if you see someone else getting bullied. The main goal here is to scare the crap out of them so they leave you alone.
- You okay bud
- Hit the gym until they no longer dare to bully you
- Where I'm from originally, it's perfectly fine to hit someone for bullying you. Nine times out of ten the bully is weak him/herself and cowers if you "return in kind" of how they treat you. I don't know why many Westerners are reluctant to hit a bully. But my guess is that the fear of litigation is the bigger fear.
Yeah if someone called me that I’d just accuse them of being too stupid to read and then talk real slow to them.

This happened in my art class once. Our kooky art teacher invited an ex-student in without any prior warning and we were supposed to ask him questions on his art (he did book covers).

Silence, no one was having this shit. Out of pity I asked him questions on some tiny details I noticed on the spot. More silence, I ask about different tiny details. And so forth.

I've realised that there's a large portion of the populace that are perfectly comfortable in excruciating silence if it's not at their expense.

Just imagine this with the books I had to read in school. Yes, I would have read it, I'm a fast reader, so a bad book does not waste too much time. On the other hand, I would have no problems with grilling the author over the shit he or she wrote. Because basically every book we had to read for school was crap. There are so many good books, books that would spark interest and passion for reading more, but somehow they had selected the worst of the worst back then, aimed at making children reel in horror when they see books and vow never to touch a book again after school.

Part of it is also what they make you do to the book. I remember one exercise involving a book of our choice and of course I selected one I already liked at the time. The analysis itself tends to make a book a lot less fun.
Huh. I guess my experience was better I remember reading My Side of the Mountain and The Giver, among other things. Usually pretty decent reads though.
- I read The Giver as an adult, and I can absolutely confirm it was good. I also recall the books I was required to read were pretty good, but I didn't like them at the time because they were required.
- I really enjoyed these books, I remember them to this day

You're a good person ass-worm

Ugh, can relate. I love to read; I used to go through two books per week as a kid during middle school and high school. Not even just fiction, but non-fiction about topics that interested me like space and aviation. I even read books on my Palm Pilot PDA, well before e-readers were a thing.

So as you can imagine, I had an exceptional vocabulary compared to classmates. This had some annoying effects as well. Whenever I did written assignments for a new class with a different teacher, they’d always accuse me of either cheating or plagiarism. Because I was using way more ‘difficult words’ than classmates. A two minute conversation usually cleared it up; they quickly found out that I did in fact do the work and understood the assignment.

I don’t envy teachers today. Reading comprehension has declined sharply, and kids just don’t like to read as much as they did when I was young. Despite the fact that books are now way more accessible to them. I fear it’s going to result in an illiterate generation…

I read everything I could get my hands on (and still do), except the shit they assigned us for school.

I get "historically relevant" classics are a thing, but students don't want to read most of them because they're brutally formal and none of them can relate to them. It's a chore primarily because the curriculum is all old and because burying 500 layers of symbolism into a story isn't how people write any more (because it sucks).

If more reading assignments were stories written to actually entertain kids and just asking the kids to put themselves in the character's shoes and "what would you do", maybe they wouldn't hate reading so much.
- At some point I started dialing up the symbolism interpretation up to 11 but somehow they didn't like that either. I came to the conclusion that they want you to validate their particular interpretation of a work even if it put too much thought into it compared to the author, not put too much thought into it yourself.
Maybe not illiterate.

But I run into a lot of people who are incomprehending, and too proud to ask for elaboration when they didn't get what you said or wrote.

If this happened at my school people would thank op for making the assembly less awkward

Good job anon. No good deed goes unpunished.

fkn worth it

Middle School sucks ass for everyone who's not a rich kid.

~~Middle~~ School sucks ass for everyone who’s not a rich kid.
Nah, in my school, it was the rich kids who got beat up. School just sucks for everyone.

Source: was middle class and generally had an okay time

Sounds like a win

Worth, 1000x over.