Mike Messier

Read a Book... And Write in It

As a schoolchild, my classmates and I were instructed NOT to write in our books. This, we were routinely told, was because at the end of the school year, we would have to turn in our books to our teachers for their inspection. If we were good students and our books were in acceptable enough shape and if we did not bang them up too bad, we could return the books without incident and without our parents getting fined money. Of course, we never inherited the books in perfect condition in the first place and there was some elaborate — and mysterious — grading scale the teachers used to keep tabs on all of this.