Fifth grade only one book was assigned as a reading project for the year, Caddie Woodlawn. Perfectly good book, but I read the whole thing the first week of school. We had reading once a week. The teacher would assign a certain number of pages to read and at the end of the hour give a test on those pages.
Each week I would re-read the assigned pages - it took me less than ten minutes. Then I would pull out a library book and read that. Each week I would get a perfect score on the test so it wasn't until a month or so into the school year that the teacher realized that I wasn't reading the assigned pages out of the assigned book.
She asked why I wasn't reading the book - I told I had read it. She asked why didn't I re-read it, I told her I had. She didn't believe me, even though I could answer any question she had about the book. For some reason it offended her that I was able to read more than one book at a time and still get her tests completely perfectly. She sent me to the principal's office for talking back to her when I repeated that I HAD read the assigned book, and that I HAD read the assigned pages that day.
I took my assigned book and my library book to the office with me. The principal knew my family and knew me since he saw us in the public library every Saturday. He knew the librarian had already given me access to the Young Adult section since I had read every book in the Children's section of the library. He sent me back to class with a note for the teacher to come to his office.
I don't know what happened between the teacher and the principal. The rest of the school year I was allowed to read whatever I wanted as long as I did not let the other students know I was reading other books. She'd stop by my desk and make a note of which book I was reading - and seemed astounded that it was a different one every week. I never told her that I averaged reading 3-4 books a week at that age.
Oh - she managed to find at least one mistake on every test that year. I ended up with a B in her class even though I knew I should have gotten an A.
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