Language investigation 2

All through school, language learning was mainly restricted to learning usage conventions. “I before e, except after c” and that sort of thing. There was never much emphasis placed on style. No one seemed to care whether you could write something interesting, all that mattered was whether you could follow grammatical rules or not. If you followed the rules you were given, your writing was considered “good.”
When we read for class, we never discussed the style, word choice, imagery, metaphor, or any other stylistic devices used by the author. The only thing we discussed was plot. Teachers always seemed more concerned with whether students could read the text and comprehend the plot. In both primary and secondary school, it seemed that reading was assigned only to be sure that students actually could read. But I feel like I was never taught how to apply what I had read, or how to read critically and get more out of a text than just what was on the surface.
In primary school, the main focus was on learning to read and write, as well as expanding vocabulary and internalizing grammar conventions. We would diagram sentences to pick out the subject, verb and object, and later diagram more complex sentences where we had to find the adjectives, adverbs, or modifiers. As I went forward in school, we were taught to apply what we had learned from diagramming to create sentences and paragraphs of our own. We learned basic sentence structure, basic paragraph structure, and basic essay structure.
Then there was the issue of writing stories, poems, or other kinds of texts. In my early education, I was taught that poems must rhyme, and must have a very simple basic structure. Toward the end of primary school we learned about haiku, and I was absolutely baffled by poems that did not rhyme. It wasn’t until high school that I was introduced to poetry that had neither rhymes nor a strict structure. This was an absolutely foreign concept to me, though eventually I did embrace it. However, because of the way that rhymes were drilled into my head as a child, I now hate poetry that rhymes. I think that this was rather detrimental in the long run.
It seems I never learned much about writing, other than learning basic grammatical rules and five paragraph essays. Even now, after many years of college, I still feel like I’ve never gotten much direction or instruction on the proper techniques for writing anything other than a standard five paragraph essay.
As for reading, I can recall only a very few of the books that I read in all my years in school, because we never discussed more than just the plot of the book. Most of the books I remember were books I discussed with my final high school English teacher. However, he taught his classes in a very unique way, which I had never experienced before. He was the first teacher that ever asked us to really think about imagery, word choice, or style. Until his class, I had hated English classes because I was bored by reading a book and then having the teacher ask me to explain the plot, so he or she could be certain I had actually read the book. This began my love of the English language, and inspired me to be a teacher, so that I can try to help break out of the current system.