Grades Also Play Into A Huge Part Of The Frustration That The Original Meme Was Trying To Convey - Blog Posts

I agree! This made me have a completely separate but related thought. I hope it's okay that I share it with you and I'm definitely open to disagreements and other ways of looking at it!

I look back at the original "the curtains are just blue" meme and find the process of what it morphed into really interesting. Originally, the meme was expressing the frustration of American (and in my experience, Canadian as well) highschool asking you to examine the themes of writing without really being giving you the tools to do so. We're told what a metaphor (and the metaphor's cousins, like similies) is and how to use it, but we weren't taught about the principles of examining themes. In my english class, we were given a handful of assignments that surrounded analyzing surface level themes, but no projects that really delve into it. The student has no idea how you know when something is symbolism or when it's just a description, how a single object can be symbolic of completely different things depending on the context and characters interacting with it, etc. The student doesn't know that they don't delve deeper into this stuff because school boards are largely driven by industrialists who want school to be about preparing you to work and don't find things like media analysis nessecary, so of course it feels like the teacher is just asking you to do the impossible task of reading the author's mind.

But then, the "the curtains are just blue" meme kinda blew up and morphed into the version of the meme that you were (rightfully) complaining about (for lack of better words). It became very in-line with the views of the industrialists that (one could argue) caused the meme in the first place. Or atleast, caused the problem that inspired the meme. It became this idea that analyzing literature is boring, unnecessary, and does nothing to help you learn what's really important. A weird kind of cycle, yeah?

I'd like to do more research on this, but I really struggle to understand academic papers and stuff like that. I just think it's neat! Do you also think it's neat?

YES!