Booking Through Thursday

School Days, Golden Rule Days

Since school is out for the summer (in most places, at least), here’s a school-themed question for the week:

1. Do you have any old school books? Did you keep yours from college? Old textbooks from garage sales? Old workbooks from classes gone by?
2. How about your old notes, exams, papers? Do you save them? Or have they long since gone to the great Locker-in-the-sky?

1. Yes, I have lots of school books; it's kind of a requirement.
At my college, we paid 45 dollars per semester to rent our books; I think that is one of the best ideas ever. We had the option to buy them if we wanted to keep them, and the only one I bought was my volume of Shakespeare. It had all my good notes in it, and I use it when we read Shakespeare in my theater class.
I've bought several textbooks and workbooks online. Mostly theater textbooks, when I was trying to work out the curriculum for the class. I've also supplemented the curriculum for my reading class with workbooks from Jamestown Publishing. My kids really like the stories; they're nonfiction, so I can also link some research skills, as in, when a student asks me, "Ms. Flower, what happened after that?" I can say, "I think that's an excellent topic for a research paper."

2. I still have things I've saved since ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, essays or stories I wrote for classes. I used to have all the notes my friends and I wrote during classes too, but I threw them out when I turned 30.
I've got almost everything I ever wrote in college, thanks to computer disks. I have lots of handwritten stuff, too, just little poems or ideas I wrote when I was bored. I am a packrat, yes, but I mostly kept the stuff that I would reread and think, "I can't believe I wrote this!" (in a good way)