• Rose Thorne(She/Her)@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    My high school had a rule about the “difficulty” of books you could read. You weren’t supposed to read too high “above your grade”. I assumed this rule was something with the school library and their Accelerated Reader program.

    Nope! Tried to give me ISS because I was reading “Screwjack”, which I brought from home. It wasn’t even in class! I was a fucking junior. A high school junior should be able to handle Hunter S. Thompson.

    According to them it was “college level” and therefore I shouldn’t be reading it. My father raised absolute hell in that office. Don’t think they tried enforcing that rule again.

    They also tried bitching about girls tops until a group of very pissed off redneck fathers had questions about how they were touching the students to measure the width.

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I get the fact that reading too high above your grade means you may be way over your head in vocabulary and grammar, but it’s not entirely applicable to everyone. I read Pride and Prejudice and one friend said I sounded posh from the language I accidentally started using. So if a high schooler or junior high schooler can handle it, why not?

    • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      The AR Reading program that was popular in the early 2000s was an absolute disaster. It basically killed my love of reading for almost 10 years. They wouldn’t let me read books “above my level” based on some BS test that used timed reading. I wasn’t dumb, I just sub-vocalized when I read like a lot of people, so I read slowly. Read slow, don’t finish the test, grade poor, so “no books for you!” said the school.