Reading Is Fun-Dametal

The summer before I entered fourth grade, I spent a few weeks reading "The Andromeda Strain." It wasn't an easy read. I was only recently a third grader. A precocious third grader, but still not more than half way through my elementary school library, and yet the book I plucked from the shelf in our mountain cabin was authored by novelist and medical doctor Michael Crichton. I was encouraged to do this because I had already powered my way through "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," and my love of things science fiction-y was spurred on by my love of all things Planet of the Apes-y. I was not discouraged by my mother, who was my cultural coach and mentor when it came to literature. I spent a lot of late nights poring over each word with my flashlight, waking up early the next morning just to power through a few more pages before the day began. I understood that I was reading a grown-up book, but when I needed clarification or vocabulary help, I asked a grown-up. It was a stirring time, and when I was finished, I looked forward to the moment when I was asked by my fourth grade teacher, "What did you do last summer?"
It didn't work out quite the way I had imagined. There was no applause. I was not immediately passed along to the fifth grade. Instead, I was held up for inspection, with a good deal of suspicion by my teacher and classmates. "Did you really read that book?" I was taken aback by the criticism. There was a certain amount of this circumspection reflected onto my mother, who allowed this to happen. But there it was. I read the novel, and I liked it. What's more: I understood it. I understood it to the point that it put a little more of that fear of Armageddon in my little brain, informing my already burgeoning and dark view of the world.
Maybe that's what my teacher was concerned about. Or maybe it was just that that one book made me an outlier, somebody that would require special handling. She had a room full of books carefully selected for readers of the fourth grade persuasion. There was not a section for ridiculously advanced readers. How was she going to keep me down on the farm with the rest of the class when I was out there zipping around reading the latest best-seller? It wasn't going to happen. I was going to read the books from our library, and that was that.
Fast forward a million years into the future, where I am speaking to a colleague, much younger than myself, about his experiences as a young reader in the digital age. He told me how his school had a program called Accelerated Reader, which allowed kids to get points for each book on which they successfully completed a comprehension quiz. It was his genius moment that landed him believing that if he read "Moby Dick," the combination of the length of the book plus its difficulty would set hi up for an entire year of Accelerated Reader stars. One book and done. As it turns out, my colleague was unable in his fifth grade year, to fully appreciate Melville's whale tale. After a few attempts at the quiz, he packed it in and started looking for more grade level appropriate fare. Apparently, reading a whole lot of easy books and doing awesome on the quizzes will get you more points than trying to bring down that white whale of a book. This, he said, is how he learned about irony.