Exactly - more importantly this is preparation for college or workforce. Your college professor or boss doesn’t care that you feel that Hemingway or Java is XY

Exactly - more importantly this is preparation for college or workforce. Your college professor or boss doesn’t care that you feel that Hemingway or Java is XYZ - they want reasons. There was a trend/fad to get kids to write by encouraging navel gazing. My son recently had an assignment like this for Homer’s Oddysey. The writing assignment requested he write a response to The Beggar and His Faithful Dog. It asked for something that was hidden in his life that no one knew about. This is a literature class not creative writing. My wife’s response was that besides being inappropriate, this isn’t even the lesson / point of the beggar and the faithful dog! Her response: >The last prompt has stymied us. Why would a teen want to write, on paper, to their teacher, to be read and graded, about something so personal that they have kept it hidden and never shared it with anyone? [literally what was asked....] In the story of the Beggar and the Faithful Dog, Odysseus isn't hiding some private character trait that makes people refuse to understand him. He's carrying out a clever ruse to see what's really happening at home and whether his wife has been faithful. It's a story about cleverness, trickery, and faithfulness. Turning that into a personal exposure of hidden feelings takes the fun and adventure out of the story - and it's a boundary violation. This isn’t common core - this is left over lessons from the previous fad.