Back to school

I wonder if there are still any kids who get slightly excited at the prospect of "back to school"?

As miserable as school was sometimes (though that was mainly lunch, gym, and recess - times when it was mostly my peers and me without the structure of instruction), I looked forward to going back. It's funny, isn't it, how some things seem so big when you're a kid - I remember third grade was exciting because we were going to learn CURSIVE.

(Heh. I guess some schools don't even teach 'cursive writing' any more, which is kind of sad.)

And then fifth grade, when we'd get to use INK PENS and also the magical COLLEGE RULED PAPER. (Neither of which turned out to be so great as they were built up to be.

I've talked before about the back-to-school shopping expeditions; going out for the pair of "good" school shoes (in those days, I guess most kids still wore "street" shoes in class rather than tennis shoes. Or maybe it was just my cohort and we were one of the last; I guess my brother mostly wore tennis shoes). And getting the "right" kind of "gym shoes." (And oh, how I hated it in junior high when we had to have "gym suits" - light blue t-shirts with a patch on them where you were supposed to write your surname, which was what the gym teacher called you;  a pair of dark blue shorts with a white stripe. And they never fit quite right)

Usually we also got some new clothes. What we got and how much depended on how much we had grown since the last back-to-school..

Supplies were bought, but as I remember, the guidelines as to what we needed were a lot more general than what they are now - some schools specify down to BRAND of item, and woe unto the parent who is slow to get to the local Wal-Mart or other purveyor and find that the very item they need is sold out.

I also remember some years having to outfit an 'art kit' for art class with colored pencils and a specific kind of eraser and bring an old, outsized shirt of my dad's for use as a smock on messy art days. (Art was one of the big consolations in school: even if the other kids were making fun of you, even if things were not going so well in Math, you could almost always count on art class to make things better. We also had a run of extraordinarily nice art teachers when I was in school, and that helped a lot. Though perhaps my tendency to "like" my teachers  and not talk back to them didn't help my popularity with my peers any)

I've also been told by friends who have kids that schools now do this weird pooling-supplies thing: that is, you don't keep the pencils or notebooks or whatever you get for your kid; the stuff goes into a big box and is doled out, and that seems to me that they intend it to teach one lesson but it's just going to teach another one. (The "tragedy of the commons" - that why should you bother getting the good supplies if you're probably going to wind up having something crummy fobbed off on you from the "common box.") I will also say that some districts apparently can't afford cleaning supplies and kids are asked to bring in stuff like tissues and paper towels and hand sanitizers. (Not toilet paper as of yet, but I suppose that's coming). I don't know. I'd rather pay a bit more in property taxes than have kids have to supply the tissues and soap and all of that....even on my notoriously cash-strapped campus there are boxes of tissues supplied for the classrooms.

I wonder if schools still ever do the "treasure box" thing. As I can remember, only one year, only one teacher did that when I was in school (Mrs. Irish, third grade) but it still looms large in my memory - she had a box of small, very inexpensive toys, and if you did something particularly well, or answered a specifically hard question sometimes, or were just being well-behaved when other people weren't, sometimes you got to pick a prize out of the box. And yeah, that had an impact on me. (Though maybe not entirely for good: I still kind of wish there were some kind of cosmic treasure box where you got some kind of small prize for doing something particularly well, or for being well-behaved when others around you weren't.....one of the disappointments of adulthood is that "not being chewed out has to be reward enough" in a lot of situations.)