To veer slightly off path, but it goes a bit with my complaints about Wuthering Heights and Tom Sawyer vs. Huck Finn:
I've always LOVED the book To Kill a Mockingbird. We read it early on in school; older grade school I believe. I still love the book to this day and consider it one of my favorites, yet only when I hit adulthood did I start to speculate as to why I loved this book so much.
When we read this book in school, we had a teacher very against the boring "read chapters 5-7, test tomorrow" blah blah boring blah crap. She was outstanding and a very talented teacher. Our class didn't read this book. We friggin' DISSECTED it. We analyzed every chapter, most sentences, laughed together when Scout (fresh off the "I learned to cuss" boat) asked someone to pass the damn ham, please. We were encouraged to shout out answers and forget the "raise your hand" stuff. The class was so interactive and so unlike so many others that the environment itself was so nurturing---nurturing to readers who loved analyzing and nurturing to non-readers who weren't subjected to the boring as butter "read this, take a quiz, read the next bit, take another quiz", etc. All views were respected, and some were challenged but not in a harsh or confrontational manner. It was a classroom for sure, but it was a start in treating a group of kids as young adults. In short, this teacher taught us to read for comprehension, and to think.
We spent an entire semester on this book alone.
At the end of a read, we were always granted a few days to watch the movie. I'll never forget it. During the trial scene with Mayella and Atticus, the bell rang. No one got up to leave the classroom.
I credit several of my teachers for instilling such a love for reading, writing, and art as a whole. Classes like this solidified the idea that reading can be more than skimming a book. You can (in your mind) become it. In later years, I had another very talented teacher who had the same ideas, and same views, and the classroom was less of a class and more of an open forum. We were given the rights to behave like "little adults" and, in turn, took that seriously and showed that respect back to the teacher and one another. Very cool lessons learned. Good teachers ought to be given a trillion dollar bonus and a fancy new car for going the extra mile.