© 2025
As a child, I used to read Geronimo Stilton books in my school's library. I would spend countless afternoons reading whatever I wanted, whatever interested me. I don't think I ever finished reading a single book during this period of time. One particular time I remember was reading a large book on dinosaurs, I was one of the few people who did so, at least if I recall correctly.
We would occasionally watch movies in the library, movies like The Lorax (2012). I know that doesn't sound good but we were kids so it wasn't that bad.
I asked my classmate about this period of time a few years ago, and he also remembers it fondly. My class was a rowdy one, I don't think we were ever destined to be a bunch of book lovers (to my misfortune); we always left behind a mess in the library, and made the librarian mad (we still did all the way to the end of high school).
That being said, I also remember this period highly fondly, and I consider it to be the period of time where I was introduced to and fell in love with reading. Though most of my classmates were not actually reading books, I do want to believe, that if they'd never adopted Scholastic's program, that most of them would come to at least tolerate reading books.
In fifth grade, my school adopted a reading program run by Scholastic, the famous multinational book company who publish Geronomo Stilton books.
I did not really care to get the actual name of this program during my time in high school, which speaks to how much I liked it. It utilized various platforms created by Scholastic: Scholastic Reading Counts!, a software utilizing a database; and Scholastic Literacy Pro alongside Scholastic Learning Zone.
Books were categorized using the Lexile Scale, intended to be for certain age brackets. Using either software or Scholastic Literacy Pro, your lexile is measured using various reading comprehension questions. As of graduating high school, my lexile was 1517L. De jure, you were only allowed to read books 100 lexile points below your own score and 50 points above your score (Targeted Reading Range).
Originally, my school had a minimum required amount of books read as 20, however they raised this limit to 40. Take this with a grain of salt, as the school librarian insisted to me that it was always 40, when I asked him about it. If you did not read 40 books by the end of the school year, the school would do something. Not sure what it was exactly as I never had it happen, I think it was them refusing to sign something related to your report card. Regardless, my school never actually held anyone back over this.
In my opinion, the system is flawed and damaging.
The Targeted Reading Range was almost never followed as it was outright impossible. My school's library doesn't have the same amount of books Scholastic's platform did, and thus a lot of books couldn't be tested at all. Scholastic's own platform, Scholastic Learning Zone, has less e-books in its library than Scholastic Literacy Pro had quizzes, rendering a lot of potential reads impossible unless you personally owned the book. Almost all students in my school are forced to venture outside of the reading range, often below it, in order to even gleam the goal of 'reading' 40 books. The task of having to 'read' 40 books each year left most of my classmates to despise reading, however like I said, they were never predisposed to liking it in the first place; however what is concerning is that other students from both higher and lower grade levels expressed the exact same sentiment.
The Lexile Scale is ridiculous. I don't have any sort of credentials in this field, but as a student who has used a system using Lexile, it is just stupid. The easiest books I read throughout my time in high school always came from the highest lexile. They were often short and easy to digest anecdotes. Some books way below this lexile range have given me more problems (don't ask me to name any books, I don't remember most of what I was reading). Just look at Wikipedia's page for Lexile. A hint of what I was talking about can be seen on the table of sample lexile scores. Why in the world is a book written by Stephen Hawking (1290L), considered a high school-level book? Why is Twilight (720L) considered middle school level (I guess the vocabulary, but no middle schooler should be reading that)? I can't even put into words how much this scale infuriates me.
I will not go in-depth on it here, but I personally have seen and knew of a lot of cheating going on for this program. I know that it is typically an unspoken rule, to never mention something like this, but if one wants to truly see how ineffective and damaging this program is, you should be aware of the cheating problem. There are so many different ways to cheat or quickly cheese through this program without having improved your own reading comprehension. All of which I have seen others do throughout my time in high school. I've also seen other people offer to finish someone else's books, because for various reasons they could not finish it on their own. There's also purposefully flunking the Lexile pre-test in order to have a lower reading range, something that was very common here.
The entire program also severely limited what one could read. For one: all books had to be published by Scholastic. Some of my favorite books as a child were not published by Scholastic. Most of my favorite books at the end of high school were not published by Scholastic. You were stuck with reading books you did not like if you ran out of books you did like. Geronimo Stilton was a low-lexile book, while most children could read that, it didn't happen often. I'm not a scientist or anything, I'm not actually sure why this was the case.
If you asked me to name a single book I read under Scholastic's program, I could name a single one: Tales from Outer Suburbia, as it's one of my favorite books. I cannot remember anything else. The entire thing was utterly monotonous and it was difficult for me to derive any actual joy out of being forced to read 40 random books, almost all of which I was never interested in.
Please. Just let the kids read. Let them roam around the library, experience the magic of reading a good story for the first time. Let them pick up a book they choose, whether the book is 1500L or 100L, just let them read what they choose. Because that's how I fell in love with reading. I wasn't forced to read 40 random books and picked one I liked. I walked into the library and picked up a random book off the shelf - as it should be. I have not seen this program foster love for reading, if anything I've seen the opposite. It's also debatable what sort of impact it had on my school's collective reading comprehension, or if it unfortunately did lasting damage to the youth.
In my last year of using Scholastic, on February 1, I began listing the last books I needed to hit the 40 book goal. The final book I read was apparently "Steven Spielberg" (1200L). I do not remember anything about the book.
© 2025