Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.
Once you slice open the shipping boxes that contain your rental textbooks, you are L.B. Jefferies and you’re deep into Rear Window mode.
Every scholar who has ever rented those books and highlighted the pages stands naked before you.
You identity them first by color: The kid with the pink highlighter, for example, obsesses over specifics; the yellow highlighterer has a thing for overwritten paragraphs; Ms. Orange is all about chapter summaries. You can guess race, ethnicity and gender by underscores in the subculture sidebars. And then there are the kids who violate the margins: “This is total bullshit!” is my favorite.
Campbell Cream of Tomato Soup stains (popular at greek houses) say more about table manners than intellectual capacity. Stiff, warped pages means the book had slipped into bath water.
Start by flipping through the pages to see which highlights vanish after the early chapters, the student has dropped the class or decided to blow it off. Either way you don’t want to use their glyphs as a study guide.
