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So when we write "to an 8th grade level", I guess we should also specify
which era.
A similar anecdote:
I recently looked at my grandfather's reading primer from about the turn
of the Century (last one). It included, among other fairly dense
material, poems by Tennyson. What I wonder though, given the emphasis on
memorization and the relative scarcity of materials in those days, is
whether very many students could actually read the reader, or whether
they just learned to recite it from memory through repetition (still
quite an achievement by today's standards).
