Ha, I was thinking about my English classes and realized something I'd apparently mostly wiped out of my memory, which is that we read Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) when I was a junior in American Lit -- and we did not have the technical skills to follow it at all. I still didn't completely hate it, because it was a book, but I remember being baffled, and we'd go to class and be asked to discuss it and no one would say anything because we didn't understand it at all! However, what seems to have been different from your experience is that we were not told we were wrong about anything; as far as I remember we weren't told much at all. (My American Lit teacher was a very nice lady, and I think intelligent too, but wow she was not a great teacher.)

(In fact, I think this was a theme -- I had more than my fair share of good, sometimes great teachers, but the ones who were not good were generally not good in the way where they just didn't seem to do very much, so I guess passively rather than actively pedagogically bad? Like my US history teacher who just sometimes didn't come to class and told us to write outlines of our history book chapters which as far as we know she never looked at.)

The payoff of amount I learn is way higher in nonfiction than fiction

Yeah, I tend to retain a lot more from fiction. Like, a month after having read them both at approximately the same time, I am retaining a lot more about Jemmy and Charles from The King's Touch than I am about the queens in A Game of Queens. But that of course is also a function of not knowing very much history :)

I wouldn't have given it a second thought if it was by someone I didn't have reason to trust.

I mean... that's fair, and approximately how I feel about TV/movies at this point (although I still like them/consume them more than you do fiction).

After several years of guessing and being corrected

...Oh man, this phrasing hit a bell in my head: this is the Rozetta Stone style of learning languages! Aka the program that made my kid think she was terrible at languages, even though she had done perfectly well in a more conventional classroom before that.

(Although in a social, non-academic context I do like guessing about what's going to happen next in media, which I've always been wildly bad at and which is entertaining to those around me. When I read Prisoner of Azkaban in grad school, I'd read about a chapter every day and then entertain the friend who had lent me the book by each afternoon describing my current theories about what was going on while we walked home. He laughed pretty hard at me, because I was not right even a little bit :) But I never -- I almost wrote I fortunately never had to do that in school, but I suppose it would be rather more accurate to say that I was never any good at waiting however long they expected me to wait to read the whole thing. They probably did expect me to guess what happened next, but I couldn't!)