Was reminded of this as I typed about a classmate of mine that had a crush on Frodo in the autism you witnessed IRL thread. This could cross over to there, but it's school related. So here you go.
In a crappy middle school there was a teacher obsessed with The Hobbit. Not even Lord of the Rings, although we did talk about it and The Simarillion for a brief moment at the beginning. Just The Hobbit. And just my luck, since she was the sixth grade gifted reading skills teacher (for some reason we had English class split into reading and language arts, with ranks of remedial, normal, and gifted), guess who my gifted student ass got assigned to.
Now, it wasn't a complete surprise that I was to study Tolkien's classic children's novel. However, she pulled a bait and switch with the syllabus. We were supposed to read and analyze The Hobbit for our second unit that year. Instead we ended up reading and analyzing it for the whole school fucking year save for the first month (which was just random short stories). We had to draw the characters from descriptions of the novel, define vocabulary, create skits complete with dance and song. We had to write multiple page essays analyzing x character or event. It was basically a college course on The Hobbit unexpectedly thrust onto us but with more autism (see: skits complete with dance and song. She actually wanted us to make and wear costumes, too, and gave points to the one kid that actually cosplayed as Bilbo.)
She was very passionate about all of this. If she didn't like how you drew Thorin, for example, she'd give you a failing grade. She'd even tell the entire class if you passed or failed certain assignments. "Jack drew Gandalf very well, he gets 100. Toilet drew Bilbo well, but too sickeningly cute. Hobbits are cute, but not that cute. 75! Bobby, you did not give the trolls in chapter two justice! 50!" Apparently she really wasn't supposed to do this, and when word got out she was banned from doing her own Hobbit 101 vanity project as a class subject ever again.
On one hand, I learned a lot about critical reading and still carry some of the critique skills I obtained from that class to this day. On the other, even the LOTR nerds in class fucking hated The Hobbit by the end of the year. I think that if we sixth graders were able to sign up for a Hobbit analysis course and it didn't get uber autistic we would've been fine. But come May we were done. My childhood best friend would even occasionally troll me for years by putting on Leonard Nimoy's Bilbo Baggins song at random or in Rickroll style to piss me off, including burning it on CD mixes for me full of songs we downloaded from Limewire (lol). Only within the past couple years have I softened to even entertaining the idea of rereading the book. Didn't even bother with the Hobbit Jackson trilogy despite hearing how entertainingly bad they are save for Cumberbatch Smaug.
Oh yeah, also this- She refused to let us watch the cartoon movie because she had thrown her VHS tape out a window in disgust over a decade prior. In its place we watched the BBC version of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.