Things have sure changed. No, I wasn’t quite riding a pony to a one-room schoolhouse carrying a slate and a stick of chalk, but “back to school” definitely looked a lot different when I was a kid.
First, there was the ritual of shopping for school supplies, which meant a visit to Value Village or Ben Franklin. You got a pencil case with a cool sliding thing on top that gave the answers to multiplication problems, and of course some brand new, bright yellow Number 2 pencils with clean, crisp erasers that were doomed to be worn into dirty stubs within a month.
Crayons – oh, how joyous were the rare years that your mother bought the big box of 64 brilliant colors.
A composition notebook, with the black-and-white squiggles all over the cover; or loose-leaf notepaper that you snapped into a three-ring binder.
Maybe a bottle of glue, maybe a new lunch box, and a book satchel – plaid, of course.
And that was about it.
There were no “Jump Starts,” no orientations, no open houses.
I don’t even know how anyone knew when the first day of school would be. I guess it was in the newspaper. Maybe they sent letters home, but I doubt that. There certainly weren’t any “OneCalls” or Parent Portals or text alerts.
So you got up on the first day of school and got dressed in your new clothes – girls in dresses, boys in slacks, nobody in jeans or shorts – and off you went.
You might walk to the bus stop, but more likely, you just walked all the way to school. The idea that your parents would take you to school was … well, weird. Who in the world would do that?
You tried not to get there too early, because who wanted to stand in the playground feeling all awkward and self-conscious with your plaid book satchel upon realizing that the cool kids had cartoon characters and superheroes on theirs.
But you didn’t want to get there too late, either, because that would mean you had to hurry to find your homeroom as the sound of the bell echoed down the hallway and everyone else somehow already knew where to go and you were lost and maybe you could just hide in the restroom or sneak out the door and go back home and never come out again.
The teacher called the roll and pronounced your last name wrong but you just raised your hand anyway and whispered “Here” in a tiny voice and then sat in silent shame because everyone else had easy names like Brown or Jones or Miller.
Then the teacher passed out what seemed like an endless number of papers, warning you not to lose them, they were very important, they must be filled out and returned promptly, and you stuffed them into your satchel but immediately forgot all about them because you were so miserable in realizing that your best friend since kindergarten was not in your room this year and now you don’t have any friends and nobody likes you and after all why should they because you are carrying a plaid book satchel.
No, everything is much easier and more efficient now, with online registration and “welcome back” events that give you a chance to find your room and claim a locker and meet the gym teacher who is really nice and you realize there might actually be some fun games coming up and not just dodge ball where you are the last person chosen for teams and the first person eliminated by that mean kid who throws the ball so hard that it leaves a red circle that doesn’t go away for hours.
Everything is different now, and almost all of it is better …
… but there will always be those moments of anxiety on the first day of school.
Thank God for those parents and teachers who know every child is special. Even the ones with the crummy 8-packs of crayons. Even the ones with the plaid book satchels. Even the ones with funny names. Even the ones who are lousy at dodge ball.
That’s the greatest lesson of all, and it will never change.