Words Like Violence, a Friday Rant.

Holy hell, I hate AR. Hate hate hate. It's not just the forced reading. It's not just the assigning points to books. It's not just the way PUBLIC SCHOOLS have to pay for each and every test, and don't even buy the same tests district-wide.
Nor is it only the way everyone just expects public libraries to be on board and change their organization practices (you know, like alphabetical. By author.) or the fact that I see a definite difference in the way reading for pleasure is viewed by my jr high kids (who have AR) versus my high school crew (who have a 20 minute free reading period every day).
The parents who ask, over the summer, whether we have AR tests their kids can take, during the summer, are up there on my reasons for hating AR (especially when they get shirty about the fact that we don't*), but even they aren't my biggest beef with the system.
My Biggest Problem With AR
I'm revising our copy of the jr high AR list, because my brain isn't functioning well enough right now to do any of the things I need/want to do that require thoughts beyond "cut" or "paste" or "alt tab".
An aside: Funnily enough, most of the books on the list that are part of our YA collection are also the books on my report for weeding, which goes to show you how the AR people and the test-choosers really have their fingers on the pulse of our fair town. And now I'm stuck with decisions like, Do I keep a book that I'm assuming the jr high library owns but no one even looks at here, and take up precious precious shelf space, just because someone might need it to get their last 5 points to get to the next grade? All that shojo manga's gotta go somewhere, people, and I'm guessing neither Stephenie Meyer's or Christopher Paolini's third books are gonna be exactly thin.
So, back on (sort of) track, I'm going through this excel spreadsheet of all the books. A lot of them are in kids' fiction, but some are in YA.
Some of the titles on the list in our YA collection:

• Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Hard Love
• Born Confused
• Of Mice and Men

Now I love all of these books (yes, even Of Mice and Men. I like Steinbeck, okay?), and recommend most of them whenever I can. Which is whenever it's appropriate. Let's repeat that, shall we? In bold?
Which is whenever it's appropriate.
The jr high stops at 8th grade. Hard Love is not a book for an 8th grader, no matter how smart they are (or how many AR points they need, as is more frequently the case).
Is it any wonder that we're seeing more challenges coming from 5-8th grade parents when these books are offered with no regard for the maturity level of their content? It's like saying James Kochalka's work, all of it, is all-ages-appropriate based on the simplicity of his drawing style and the small number of words he uses.
And, yeah, I was there when Aiden Chambers was all, this is how they learn to be adults! Read up-level, kids! but I think there's a difference between challenging oneself and reading something before you're old enough to get all the meaning it wants to give you.
And this is true for books aimed at 20- and 30-somethings placed in YA collections as well, from the other end. Paul Moves Out is an amazing book, and one that many teenagers probably enjoy. I would have really liked it at 16. But I don't think I would have enjoyed it enough if I had read it before being that age, living similar experiences, etc, myself.
Plus, I have to respectfully disagree with a man who wrote what is most possibly the most boring piece of fiction I've ever read not directly for a class.

Did this make any sense, or should I just go back to staring at the spreadsheet and thinking about yarn?

*And, hell, I don't even know if we could, or if it would count for the kid. Public libraries aren't part of the school district in most cases, including YOURS, you mook.