Guess whose third-grader reads at the 8-grade level.
Yes.
N’s reaction was, “I don’t get it. She reads exactly like I did at her age. And I’m very average. What scale are they using?”
He’s average, you know?
I can’t even.
The biggest problem with very brilliant people is that they sincerely think that lower-IQ folks simply know less facts. That different processors can perform different operations is something they don’t believe.
Clarissa's Blog 
A lovely older lady I know read Dicken’s Great Expectations in school in 4th grade. I read it in 10th grade. My daughter’s generation read it in honors English. It is now a college-level book.
On the one hand “thou shalt not fail the Negro” is the ugly *sine qua non* of our academic cesspool.
And also both limited and exceptional mental-capacity exist.
And there is such a thing as sand in the gears.
I’d have a deeper convo with the husband on this one.
Multivariable equations always give students the most difficulty.
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How does one test for reading level exactly?
Is it just look at what they’re reading and comprehending, and then compare it to some kind of grade-level score?
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It’s computer-based. You get harder and harder texts that go for as long as you can comprehend them.
But she has a very extensive vocabulary, so she can go up through levels.
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Ah. Does it test for grammatical complexity, or just vocabulary?
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It used to be like that before the digital tests. I remember because I had to take it multiple times so they could determine my reading level (they would start with something around the same level as you might pick up on your own, and my reading was so all over the place difficulty-wise that the initial test was a lower level than what was needed). There are standard texts they used and would test your comprehension in those, rather than what you actually picked up yourself.
Early readers books will frequently have levels assigned, though, which can make it easier sometimes.
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I’m curious about the parameters– I’d sort of like to know where my kids are, though I’m not worried: I give the evaluator a list of all the books they’ve read at the end of the school year, and she always does kind of a double-take, and then says “yeah, they’re totally fine on reading”. 12yo is reading Oliver Twist at the moment, and not struggling at all. I think that’s about the age at which I read it. But when you go looking for some explanation of scores like lexile measure… they’re all some weird proprietary gobbledygook that the originators refuse to explain clearly. There’s no chart correlating scores with grade level, no list of common books in score order. They want their commission in order to tell you anything.
This makes me distrust any professional, proprietary measure of reading level. If they can’t explain it to you, then what good is it?
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So, they don’t make it easy, but you can find a chart correlating lexile scores with grade level:
https://lexile.com/parents-students/measuring-growth-lexile-measures/college-and-career-trajectory/
But there’s no differentiation between what a child can understand if it’s read aloud to them, and what they can understand reading on their own (these are different– they can understand more advanced and complex things read aloud than reading on their own), and then if you use their book search feature to try to nail down reading level by, say, what the kids have read recently, they don’t have most of the books listed. Best we can do for a proxy is that Sutcliff’s *Black Ships Before Troy* ranks 1240L, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s *The White Company* ranks 1290L, and Howard Pyle’s King Arthur is 1300L– these, we’ve read, but… it fails to rank so much other stuff we’ve read, that it’s hard to tell if this is meaningful at all.
The Bill of Rights, for instance, ranks 2180L (somewhere north of 12th grade), but we’ve read that too. I’m not at all sure that means anything though.
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At age two I read books up-side down due to my dyslexia. My first grade teacher, Ms. Achison, whom i addressed at the time as “Heil Hitler”, she sported a mustache on her upper lip. She told my mother I was retarded! To this day I still cannot read books out loud, due to my brain not transferring the info my eye sees & reads to the other side of my brain-hemisphere which controls spoken languages.
My “nigger” maid she responded to Ms Achison’s slander by taking me to watch “To Sir With Love”, she told me that I had a brilliant mind. Later my brain surgeon Uncle diagnosed me as dyslexic. My parents sent me to the school for the blind which taught me how to read using braile. I am forever in the debt of Ms Jimmy my maid, I lover her with all my heart, she gave me dignity.
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No one here would have guessed any of this. You are truly prolific.
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Clarissa: People norm to themselves or peers or family members.
So how is the school going to adjust/ take into account Klara’s reading level?
Or what they suggest you do at home?
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I’m not perceiving it as an issue where anybody needs to do anything. 🙂
We haven’t uncovered a problem.
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Yeah, kids with a higher than average reading level are typically kids who already seek out challenging books on their own. Nothing extra really needs to be done.
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Its not a problem now. But not taking that into account is just bragging rights. They should use that information to develop her gifts. And obviously you make sure they don’t let her coast or use her a junior teacher’s aid.
For example:
Reading at a challenging level means you learn skills such as using a dictionary or a thesaurus (or even which ones to use, what are good ones, etc) if you can’t figure it out by inference.
It develops persistence.
It’s better to learn it earlier than to hit that wall later.
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Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a bright young bibliophile supplied with reading material that is both advancing her reading level, *and* is age-appropriate in content?
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I’m having a flashback to when my kids were little, and we had library cards at three different libraries so we could max them all out and get (theoretically) a month’s worth of stuff for them to read. As I recall, though, we usually ran out before the month was out.
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Well dang. Around here all the little libraries are branches of the main, so multiple cards get you nothing. Think how much *more* I could abuse our book limit!
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😀 😀 😀
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