My brain has a timekeeping section that operates like a not-very-creative grade school teacher’s bulletin board. There’s a snowflake for January and a heart for February and a kite for March. For September, of course, there’s a little red schoolhouse. Or perhaps a pencil, since almost no school looks like a little red schoolhouse any more.
I remember the one-room schoolhouse from my hometown primarily as a huge blaze—they burned it to give the volunteer fire department practice. No one had been a student there for more than thirty years. I started school in a red brick square that’s still being used as a school, but not for long. Taxpayers in my hometown passed a referendum to build a much bigger new school.
Back to school.
It’s an evocative phrase, isn’t it? See the bleary-eyed children—some of them not transitioning well at all from the summer sleeping schedule, some of them suffering so much from ragweed allergies they’re already longing for snow. Listen to the bells and announcements and the roar of recess. Feel the amazing fast stops and starts and really particular squeaks of new gym shoes. Smell the glue. (Don’t tell me if you can taste the paste.)
O school supplies, how I love thee!
Even when we were homeschooling my son, we went out and bought school supplies at the end of summer. We accumulated such a stash, in fact, that I now scour the writing implement drawer for brand new pencils instead of buying them.
If you haven’t seen a school supply list for a while, they’ve changed some. For one, most schools (around here, anyway) put most supplies in big containers for everyone to use. When I buy a box of crayons, it’s not my son’s box to keep in his desk. The crayons get taken out of the box completely.
Each family is asked to contribute an absurdly high number of glue sticks. The burden of “who pays for this stuff” gets shifted more and more to families. I don’t look forward to the fees I’m hearing about from middle school and high school parents (of kids in public schools, mind you). Still, teachers end up buying a lot of supplies from their own pockets.
At the college level, at least on my campus, students are reminded to budget for their “printing account,” so they can print from campus printers during the semester. A lot of what we used to Xerox “for free” for students is now available online, and they have to print it themselves. It was never free, of course. It was paid for by departments out of “supplies and expenses” budgets that have shrunk in recent years.
Regardless of who pays for what, though, it’s the end of summer, the beginning of autumn, a time of harvest and bounty. The printing accounts are full, the pencils still have their original erasers, and there are reams upon reams of paper just waiting to see what our students have to say.
(This column appeared originally in Voice of the River Valley.)
marniere 