September is and always has been the official start of the year for me and so I'm a little confused tonight thinking about going back to school because I graduated and have no school to which I can return. I am, however, going to be at a 45th year reunion with many of my high school classmates next month and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm thinking brown and gold, Honkers (my school mascot--STOP LAUGHING!), Friday night football games, bad food in the cafeteria, dances after the football and basketball games. (Can anyone tell me why we never celebrated baseball the way we celebrated football and basketball? We didn't have the big "games" or the after-game dance or homecoming parades with tissue paper floats and queens and princesses waving as if their arms and hands were bobble dolls. Baseball was always the poor relation in the high school sporting family and yet it is called our national pastime. Haven't figured that one out...)
Back to my back-to-school dilemma--I should be at Staples buying notebooks, pencil cases, protractors, pens, binders and binder paper, but I'm not. Even my kids are pretty much past the point where I have to accompany them to the store to buy school supplies. With Bryn starting graduate school and Barrett finishing undergrad, I really don't want to go to a bookstore and buy their supplies. Textbooks cost a gazillion dollars each and, when it's time to re-sell them, the professor has opted to put out a new edition and the current textbook now has a value of less-than-zero on both the open and black markets. And, of course, in college, the proper student has to have the sweatshirt (costing $100), the sweatpants (costing $60 and worn not for sweating-in kinds of activities, but for casual, non-sweaty events). And then there are all the other college fun-must-have items--decals, car stickers, bobble-head mascots (not the float waving queen/princess kind), jewelry, hats, gloves, scarves, toppers for the car radio antenna, soap dishes, glasses and mugs, etc. By the time the back-to-college shopping spree is over, someone (usually the parent) is missing a few thousands dollars and has lost his or her sense of humor in the bargain.
When I went to school (yes, in the days when dinosaurs walked the earth), all we bought was a pencil case--that actually came with pencils, erasers and a small ruler,
a protractor and a compass (there must have been a lot of lost protractors and compasses in school because we bought these every year and they aren't the sort of implement that wears out or runs out of lead or ink), and some ruled paper. My elementary school furnished the pens for all student because they were ergonomically designed (back when the word ergonomic didn't exist) so we would hold the pen correctly and not get the writers bump on the first knuckle of the finger that had the death grip on our ergonomically correct pen. I have a bump or callous on that death grip finger despite my elementary school's best efforts. I guess my finger wasn't ergonomically compatible with the pen. I know it wasn't comptabile with the compass because I constantly poked myself with that frustrating little instrument. It was these blood-letting experiencs that helped me understand that I wouldn't get lockjaw or some other dreaded disease if I hadn't just received a tetanus shot--something I dreaded more than the stabby thing in my pencil case.
So, when millions of children are returning to the classroom this week, I won't be one of them. All I have to say is, "Nah, nah, na, nah, nah..." Ha!
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2 comments:
I feel particular pain when I think about how much my books cost me. Let's put it this way, Alex is a LAW STUDENT, and he has never paid as much as I had to this semester. Eeek!
How else can the colleges and universities make a profit if they don't gouge the students for the books and supplies? My books cost less than $50/semester in the mid-60s and we thought that was expensive...
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