apriki:

First of all, symbolism is an incredibly important element of literature, and you’re only helping yourself if you let your understanding of it grow. Orson Welles didn’t write Citizen Kane about a kid who loved sledding. Animal Farm isn’t about militant pigs and Anna Karenina doesn’t dream about trains because she liked to watch Thomas the Tank Engine. There is meaning behind a lot of what people create, not only in the written medium, but also in film. To truly enjoy a Quentin Tarantino movie you have to look beneath the film master to see the film fan - someone who is butt crazy in love with watching movies and making movies, who just immerses himself in different genres and styles and mixes them all together to create things like Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds.

Second, it is an English teacher’s job to help you understand symbolism, not to tell you what every single thing means - that’s an objective choice. Where else are you going to learn this, besides in school? So if your teacher tells you that the curtains being blue means something, they’re trying to get you to stop viewing the text as a complete work and start looking at it as a construct. Little examples like that are going to help you start thinking about larger elements of symbolism within the text.

And third, assessment and curriculum have always been tied together. Testing at the end of a topic or the year is how we see if you’ve properly absorbed the set of skills you’ve been taught. And for assessment to be proper and fair, there needs to be a generalisation amongst the questions, which must always lie along the common denominator, which means that you’re gonna get asked if the blue curtains mean something. Even if you think they don’t, it’s indicative of your skills as a learner and speaker of English that you say they do.

And lastly, your English teacher has been teaching for a lot longer than you’ve been ignoring them in the classroom. They know what they’re talking about.