if i had a dollar for every /r/books user i've seen who blames their lack of interest in reading on their high school teachers for "forcing" them to read "boring books," i'd be able to afford enough booze to make me tolerant of them

Learning a language? Vocabulary and grammar. Learning chemistry? Periodic table. Learning math? Addition and subtraction, and later proofs, graphs, and equations. Baseball? Throwing and catching. Music? Scales and arpeggios. Drawing? Lines.

And history? Yeah, those dates and facts and terms are foundational. If you don't have a baseline understanding of the timeline of human history, your thinking is going to be muddled at best. You can't do Regency historiography if you can't tell the difference between the Georges.

There is absolutely no field of human endeavor that doesn't have a steep learning curve full of dull and tedious tasks that need to be repeated and repeated and repeated.

This isn't subjective and does not rely on whether this or that person finds it "engaging" or "fascinating." What matters is if the baseline work gets done. That work is ultimately what the educator is being paid (and should be paid 4 or 5 times more) to facilitate.

The fact you keep coming back to personal likes and dislikes - it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the mechanics of education. English teachers don't teach Gatsby because they personally love it and are trying to impose their tastes on everyone else, and history teachers aren't bad at their jobs when they make people memorize dates instead of do a Dead Poets' Society monologue about how cool history is. Pre-college education is about fundamentals, and there is absolutely no getting around the fact those fundamentals are not going to spark joy in every student every day.

You have real ex gifted kid vibes.

GG is not being assigned because teachers "like" it and want to impose their taste on everyone else, it's assigned so that you can learn how to read literature. Scarlet Letter and anything Hemingway are also good for this; I "dislike" them all (except for some of their short stories!), but they're absolutely excellent for what their presence in the curriculum is designed to do. Which is, again, to teach teenagers how to read literature.

As for Julius Caesar and Romeo & Juliet - if you dislike them or think they're boring, you should just not be teaching English. Or you should read more mediocre American lit under the guidance of a high school English teacher until you learn how to appreciate them.

But as another person said, elementary school teachers don't get to choose what they teach.

Edit: a tangent. This attitude towards books really bothers me. Do you see anyone who is like "students should choose whether or not they learn algebra"? Or "geometry is so boring, let's throw it out and do more times tables"? Or "I don't like Spanish verbs, i should be able to just do more adjectives"? Would you trust a coach who didn't want to teach anyone how to pass and dribble and just focus on slam dunks? Come on. Literature is an extremely rich and rewarding field of human endeavor, and as wirh every single thing that people do, there are barriers to "getting" it. Books like Gatsby, however irritating, are necessary in order to get past that barrier. Which you don't seem to have done, OP.