Floating down to Camelot

I was extremely lucky with something that happened when I was in 2nd year middle school - I realised at the time that I was very lucky, but now I appreciate it even more, and how very unlucky most of the other children were. My school (or, more probably the LEA) introduced a new reading scheme. It had, as far as I recall, stages from 1-12, where 12 represented the age-level they felt you should have reached by the time you were 12, i.e. end of middle school. (Level 1 was for very, very beginning readers.) Well, the flaw in this plan is obvious, right? And blessedly, they started the scheme with what seemed like rather a decent assessment of your 'reading level'. I believe I was assessed at level 20. What this meant for me in practice was that I and another girl were given absolutely free rein of our entire (rather good at the time) school library, no supervision, no checks, to choose what we wanted, and got to spend several lessons a week for the next three years *just reading* lovely, lovely books, while our poor comperes were working through the 'readers' and doing the questions and exercises at the end of every section (I assume in the later years there must have been more children who had reached the end of the 'readers' and joined us in library privileges). To be fair I can't really say how good/bad the readers were - they seemed to consist of short stories or extracts or versions, often cut-down or paraphrased, of a fairly wide variety of things - but I do know that for me at least they were seriously lacking in appeal compared with the option of just choosing what I wanted to read and then reading straight through it to the end (or possibly not; though I don't recall not finishing any books, I also don't recall that not being allowed - and really, they wouldn't have known!) I *think* I was asked to write up a paragraph or two about each book I read, sort of like a book report, I guess, but I don't recall that being a hardship; indeed I scarcely remember that aspect of the deal. As I say, gloriously lucky to be given school time to do what I considered a leisure activity ;-)