Ugh! My younger brother did this and won the library reading contest, I was so mad. All the books he read were around 100-200 pages, I decided to read A Tale of Two Cities and a couple other books like it. It was an injustice I read twice the amount of pages he did.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is precious.
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.