In tenth grade, I won the Drivers Ed award. Now, I don’t think I won because I was necessarily the superior driver in our class…I’m pretty sure that it was because of the notebook. Mr. Harold Jude was our teacher, and much to our disappointment, the greater part of our time wasn’t spent actually driving; it was reading about driving. No, the driving part would come later on—but for right now, he was going to drill us over and over again on the rules of the road.

Part of that process was that we had to do a notebook, and it would count as a significant percentage of our grade. At the end of each chapter was a long set of questions. He would make us write the question and then write the... (Continued)