My daughter recently confessed that she only read one book in four years of AP English in high school because it was more fun to see how much she could synthesize through classroom discussions. She got C's and saved herself hours of miserable reading - a very fair payoff in her mind.
Yep. In my case, I was willing to read the ones I liked, and elated to skip the ones I didn't. It had nothing to do with level of difficulty or length, either, as I was content to work my way through
The Count of Monte Cristo, but unwilling to bother with
Lord of the Flies.
Words can't say how delighted I was to respond to my overloaded, stressed classmates with, "You mean you read it? Why??"
Classroom discussions were a big part of our grade, so I had to fake it. I'd listen to the convo for about fifteen minutes, get the gist of last night's reading, and volunteer my perspective on it... which, since my perspective was always significantly different from any that had been offered so far, my teacher was glad to have. Divergent thinking for the win.
