When I was 11 or 12, I got an effective demonstration of why it’s a good idea to at least check out the instructions before starting a written test.

I think it was 7^th grade. I’m having trouble recalling the teacher, but I get a picture of a woman and one of several, so I’m pretty sure I was in junior high but not far into it. Normally I remember with the aid of journals or geography. If I wrote it down I’m likely to remember it better. And those moves my family made – from Long Island all the way to Southern California when I was almost 9 and all the (cultural) distance from Chula Vista to Marin County when I was pushing 16 – they help me locate and pinpoint the event I’m trying to recall. For this one, though, I wrack the memory and I pull in a feeling of being a big kid but not too big; of entering a school year where teachers talked about study habits and other attempts to organize our minds; of sitting in a chair desk facing eastward, on a fall or spring afternoon, situated between 7 and 8 o’clock in the class seating pattern.

The teacher passed out a word-covered sheet of paper to each of us, told us all we’d need was that paper and a pencil for this little test, and warned us more than once to read the instructions thoroughly before starting to work. Time!

I looked at the paper. It opened with the same advice: read all instructions before starting. Then there was a command to print my name, in capitals, in the upper left corner of the page, and by item 3 the paper had launched into a series of apparently unrelated questions, many of them requiring simple math, some in the nature of trivia or history, maybe a puzzler or two. Like everyone else in the class, I turned the page over and began some of the calculations long before I read to the bottom of the page. The only redeeming statement I can make is I did less of the henscratching than my colleagues.

Because here’s the hook. The very last instruction on the crowded page said “now that you’ve read all items, complete numbers 1 and 2 only.”