This is how I won all of the reading contests in elementary school. Sure I loved to read, but I also loved winning and the dummies only tallied books read, not pages or minutes or anything more reasonable.
My school has a system where you could only choose eligible books and each book had a pre-assigned amount of points it was worth based on reading level/pages/etc and you would have to take a quiz to make sure you read the book. So I did the opposite and I read 3 really big books worth 40pts each and only had to take 3 quizzes which for some reason were the same amount of questions as lower level books. Wasn’t enough to beat the kids that actually enjoyed reading and read a crap ton of books for fun, but at least I was able to get free tickets to 6 flags each year.
Me, who read a lot of books as a kid but never remembered to take the quizzes on the computer
This would explain the average of a 6th grade level of language skills among adults today…
ps I say this as I’ve only read 2 of the books pictured and War and Peace wasn’t among them.
Anything self-reported can be fudged. I won my schools by just saying I spent two hours (or more) a day reading super short books.
We had some computerized thing back in the late 90s that gave each book a score, usually based on complexity and length. Though I picked the highest point book we had: Gone with the Wind and ended up much worse off than if I read a bunch of smaller books because it was so god damn boring and slow for like a 5th grader.
I just checked and apparently my 4 year old has taken out over 100 books from the library.
I took out like 10 in the same timeframe.
This is precious.
