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Hell, the librarian at my sons elementary school would not let him check out certain books, because she said he could not read.

When I was eight, I was rounded up by one of the staff at my hometown's Carnegie Public Library and "charged with:

1. leaving the juvenile section that occupied the basement

2. having the nerve to try and check out William L. Shirer's "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"

3. thwarting an impromptu "literacy test" by reading a line from the book at random.

It took the intervention of my mother (who had taught me to read phonetically despite her being a teacher in the public schools) to eventually obtain the book, and the woman at the desk was adamant that it would be checked out to my mom and NOT to me.

The episode did little more than confuse me, but it outraged mater.

Mr. niteowl77

Something very much like that happened to me, too, in the third grade. My parents had to go down to the public library to have their permission in file for me to check out books from the adult's section, as I had outgrown the kid's books (also in the basement of the local public library-which was a Carnegie, too. BTW, I thought it a bit rude a few year's back when they changed the name from"Carnegie Public Library" to "(name of town) public library. Why deprive Carnegie of his well deserved honor as a public beneficiary? ). The very next year (4th grade) , all the kids were tested for reading proficiency. I scored the highest, with test results indicating I had reading comprehension levels equivalent to that of a college junior. I know those were my results and that my score was highest, because the teacher read the results aloud to the class when the results came in. This did wonders for my popularity ./s This was in 1975 or 1976-things were done differently back then.

In ~~junior high~~ "Middle School" (I felt sooo cheated when they changed the school name from Jr High to middle school the very year I went there, depriving me of the social cachet of being in ~~Junior~~ HIGH SCHOOL! ) they gave us another reading test : We were to hand them a book, they'd point at a line, and we'd read it. The *&%$###@s wouldn't LET ME read from War and Peace, a book I'd already plowed through twice! I was forced to fall back on 1984 . :-(