Seems to be about on-par with the way high-school English is taught, honestly (at least in my area). I remember my English teacher dedicating a full class perio

Seems to be about on-par with the way high-school English is taught, honestly (at least in my area). I remember my English teacher dedicating a full class period to the FIRST TWO WORDS in "The Scarlet Letter" (the words being "A throng"). I found it absolutely nonsensical and told her as much, but even though much of the class agreed, she shut down our complaints and kept teaching this way. Later in the year she began scrutinizing yet another book at the molecular level, but one of the kids in our class was the son of this book's author. He ran our teacher's analysis by his father, the author, and the guy found our teacher's reasoning hilariously inaccurate. I'm all for teaching kids literacy, but there's only so much meaning that can be gleaned from any given passage of text. At some point you're assigning meaning where there really is none, and I felt this was prevalent in some SAT questions and other standardized tests I endured during K-12. This was in a very well-regarded school district: CHCCS in North Carolina.