Take two lances and call me at the dawning

A lot of my schooling was rote learning, and a lot of the assignments my classmates and I submitted were little more than pages of text copied by hand - verbatim - from reference works, punctuated with the occasional lame drawing or photocopied image. I'll never forget a fellow student hiding a cheeky message in the middle of such an assignment, asking the teacher to make a mark to show he was still reading. When it was graded and returned to her, there was no mark. In an even cheekier move, she called him on it. His excuse: "I didn't want to mess up that page by writing in the middle of the text." None of us bought that for a second.