In this paper, I will explore the experience of noticing/becoming attentive to something in education. What does it mean to take notice of something in an educational way, and how does something become educationally noteworthy? In order to grasp in more detail the idea of something being noteworthy, I turn to the metaphor of pearl diving – as this appears in the works of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin - and to Martin Wagenschein’s theory of exemplarity. These perspectives helps us to grasp not only the centrality of exemplarism in education. It also helps us to grasp what makes something educationally noteworthy, and how this is connected to attention and formative experiences. From this, we can return to a formulation of what makes some forms of notetaking educational.