Honestly which teacher you have genuinely has an impact on what fields you have an interest in. Going into grade 11 I had neither an interest in English nor Biology. But my bio teacher was genuinely amazing and did everything she could to help us with the subject, including explain hard to understand topics over and over again in different ways to help get through to us.

Meanwhile my grade 11 English teacher was was very much the old timey type of teacher, the kind where you just know the only reason no one in class is getting flogged is because that's illegal in the 21st century. Super strict and super patronizing when you don't understand the material instead of actually helping you understand it. It got to the point where our class (along with her other classes in the same grade) literally started an online group so we could help each other through her bullshit, silver lining being that her class was a bonding experience for us. Combined with the fact that I was already struggling a bit because English is not my first language (I was still fluent and was in the normal English classes in Canada) basically made me despise English and literature in general. I learned more about fiction writing from writing and roleplay forums than I did in that class.

I ended up almost failing English while acing high school bio which led to me majoring in ecology in uni (though to be fair I was already very much inclined more toward science than any other field). Luckily my first year uni English prof was great and that class helped restore my interest in literature enough to start writing fiction on my own. All my hobby writing projects were from University onwards.

This is the reality of using standardized testing to evaluate school efficacy and funding—teach the test content, don’t teach how to learn.