In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates.
My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.