Why you SHOULD ‘Dog-Ear’ your Library Book
The above picture is what dog-earing a book means (if you weren’t 100% sure).
Now why would you dog ear a library book?
Its not YOUR book.
In fact, you are ‘borrowing’ a book from the library.
You wouldn’t want someone to do that to your own book.
I thought the same for a long time.
“It’s disrespecting the book,” I would say.
Then I realized something:
Dog-earing isn’t disrespectful.
If anything, when you illegally download a book online, along with thousands of readers, you’re farther along the ‘disrespectful spectrum then the sincere dog-earer.
Do you know what’s even more disrespectful than dog-earing?
This:
Let’s Reframe dog-earing.
When someone dog-ears a book, yes, it may seem like they are defiling it. However, they are also leaving a mark.
Something about the page that they bookmarked was important to them.
Now, their importance to a topic might be completely different to you. That particular page might find NO MEANING when you read through the book.
However, the act does something that frankly, the book is doing on its own:
Its leaving someone’s mark on an experience.
The book you’re reading is likely someone’s experience around a certain problem or circumstance.
The solution to that problem must have been of some interest to you. Hence, you reading it.
I remember opening up my Grade 12 Chemistry textbook in one of the hardest classes that I had to take in high school.
It was strategically marked with highlighting, dog-ears, and written notes.
When I saw this, I actually felt that I had better positional play than my classmates who were given brand new textbooks.
While they were going through the course, using lecture material and the practical experience of lab projects, I felt like I had an added advantage (regardless of how small) of someone else’s experience.
Now you could very easily say that the experiences of the previous student and my own were vastly different in context.
You could also say that the weaknesses and questions of previous students may be clear concepts in your own mind.
Where YOU had questions, the previous readers sought no need to make any markings or references.
All true.
Maybe this is the historian inside of me wondering what that student thought, when marking the reading material.
Regardless, the markings and highlighting served to ask questions where I thought no need to.
“Do I really know this?”
“Am I really not in need to look further in this seemingly understood concept?”
“Is Mr. Wong going to ask an incredibly difficult question about this topic that I haven’t really looked to deep into?”
Many times, I would look further into these highlighted concepts and many times, doing so helped. It did so in small ways but those successes helped in snowballing my confidence in a very anxiety-inducing subject.
The Universe is Indifferent to your Dog-Earing Pet Peeve
Going back to the example of library books, don’t get upset when others dog-ear a book that you’ve been waiting to read.
Like Don Draper says, “The Universe is indifferent.”
No one cares that you’re upset.
Instead take the situation in stride. Put on your scholar-warrior hat and try to go back in time and look forward.
Think about what might have drawn the previous library patron to highlight that page.
Who knows, it might shed some new light on the problem you’re hoping to solve with that book.
