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Hi, some-time on-and-off lurker, first time commenter (not that, having read the other comments and replied, this is at all my first comment).

Sorry to hear about that clueless teacher - and the almost equally clueless people who wouldn't think such a thing would happen! (I don't think I'm that much older than you (if I even am) and the stuff I heard growing up would get people scrambling for the smelling salts nowadays...)

where were you when you understood that the Narnia books are about Christianity? Or did you always know?

We had to do a unit on LWW in fifth grade. I have no recollection when I learned that Aslan was an allegory for Jesus, but I remember it being already in the back of my mind by the time we even got to the point of the Stone Table.

(Background: I was being brought up and raised as an Evangelical, and was already no longer believing by fifth grade - my overall first impression of the book was quite negative about its message, albeit with a few very bright spots with the vividness of Lewis' descriptions - I loved the White Witch, was amused at the lion who was going around with the "us lions" schtick, and identified very much with pre-battle Edmund for years. While I did get and enjoy a few snippets of SC in my teens and mid twenties (I am an avid non-reader and non-finisher of books -_-), it would be many years before I'd pick up OOTSP after being inspired by that Iron Maiden song, then discover the Screwtape Letters and have it be one of the many, many things (the manyness itself being among them) that ended up eventually pointing me back to Christianity, albeit in an utterly different understanding of it than the one I grew up with. So anyway, yeah the Narnia books are definitely more preaching to the choir in my mind than reaching out to the unchurched.)

To add to

siderea's point, some of us (including probably Lewis himself) would consider the ancient pagan god him/her/them/hir/itself to be a shadow of the real Jesus - who, in turn, is to that great pagan god what that god is to the watered-down, misunderstood, n-minus-one-dimensional "Jesus" preached by the college Christian Union types.