I'm teaching Lord of the Flies again this year.
I lost the copy I annotated last year when I taught it the first time, so I went to a local used-book joint to acquire another. I made the rookie mistake of failing to look inside the book before purchase. Unhappily, the book belonged to a student at some point, who lavished it with her own annotations.
They're crap. Absolute garbage. The student was clearly told to annotate and attempted to do just that in Chapter 1. However, the student mostly just noticed the existence of literary devices like "elliteration [sic]" and "simile" without talking about why the hell that matters. She defined vocabulary words she didn't know, which is fine and good. And that's, like, it. There were few character tracking observations, and the few that were there are wrong. Nothing on symbols or themes, which is hilarious because Lord of the Flies is a book that smacks you in the face with its themes through the use of pretty blatant symbols. That's (one of the reasons) why we teach it.
Fortunately, the student was also lazy, as students are, and stopped annotating after Chapter 1 before picking it up again in Chapter 9. (The book has twelve chapters.) The Chapter 9 annotations are also awful. We see some more "elliteration". She now thinks that every passage is foreshadowing, except that she misses all the actual instances of foreshadowing and picks up on ones that aren't. Hilariously, she also thinks that a thing that doesn't actually happen is foreshadowed. And, of course, none of the important stuff is in there.
(On a side note: when I taught the book last year, one student in one of my classes insisted, during class discussion, that everything was foreshadowing, such that it became a running joke. On those rare occasions when it actually was foreshadowing, I often went to him very ostentatiously. Sometimes he forgot that that was His Thing. It was adorable.)
I know that annotating a book is hard and also boring, which is why I'm only having my students do it for specific short segments of the text rather than the whole thing. I'm not angry at this poor disinterested student. I'm angry at myself for not checking, which trapped me into having to look at this kid's red-pen-inscribed nonsense.