School Family

Good column from Atlanta from a dad who doesn’t miss the annual scramble now that his youngest is off to college. It *is* amazing how none of the supply goodies you can get for free (pens from the hotel or conference, backpack from the camp give-away, etc.) are ever actually the right supplies for school.  Must be a conspiracy….  Where do all those mechanical pencils disappear to anyway?  Must be in that same secret compartment with all the single socks that go missing.

We made it through the first week of school and so far, so good. Except I lost the fight to convince my 4th grader to start the year with a fresh notebook.

I knew it was time to give up when, after the first day of school, I found him taping blank sheets of paper over the page dividers of last year’s spiral-bound notebook. I asked him what he was doing. “Covering up all this stuff I drew in 3rd grade,” he said. “The pictures are just so…you know, bright. And this way I’ll have plenty of room to write down the names of my new subjects.” What he wasn’t saying was he thought his old drawings were babyish and he didn’t want any of the other kids seeing them.

I considered pointing out that he wouldn’t have to bother with the cover-up if he’d just let me buy him a new notebook, but in the end, I kept my mouth shut. My son has 10 months ahead of him of having to do what he’s told. The least I can do is accept his decision about what notebook he uses. So what if it’s not something I would start the year with? That recycled notebook is a statement of his own values, not his mother’s

My son received a card in the mail from his new teacher welcoming him to 4th grade. The teacher included the much-anticipated supply list. Fortunately, I already have a good number of items on it (like the glue sticks and boxes of crayons I picked up for 20 cents each during my mid-summer buying frenzy). Unfortunately, the entire list was written in Spanish, so I have to take my son’s translation at its word.

He’s in a Spanish immersion program, the hope being that his early start will give him a good shot at learning the language).

The list renewed an argument my son and I started when school ended in June. He came home on his final day of school, pulled his ratty old notebook from his backpack, and began tearing out the pages that had been used. He told me he intended to reuse the notebook when school started up again. My blood ran cold. I may have mentioned before that my fondness for spiral-bound notebooks borders on being creepy. Little gives me as much pleasure as a brand-new notebook and its promise of words yet written. When I give my child a pristine notebook each fall, it symbolizes a fresh start to a new school year.

I told all of this to my son. He’d have none of it. He formed a rational argument about wasted paper and the need to protect our planet by recycling and reusing. I did what I always do when I sense I’m losing an argument to one of my children. “We’ll discuss this another time,” I said.

Argh! They got me. I swore I wouldn’t be sucked into the back-to-school shopping hype until the first day was clearly in sight. But then I saw an ad for 10-cent notebooks.

Just one dime for 70 spiral-bound pages! I just knew the offer would be gone by Aug. 27 (which, in my town, is the day before school begins and which, if past years are any indicator, is when I would have started my back-to-school shopping).

My personal weakness for notebooks propelled me to the store, where across the aisle I spotted boxes of 24-count crayons for 20 cents each. Now, if I took all of the barely used crayons in my home and laid them end to end, they would circle the earth seven times. Yet at 20 cents for 24 crayons (that’s less than a penny each!), I felt it would be irresponsible not to buy a couple of boxes. Then I spotted the glue sticks….

I prefer to delay back-to-school shopping until the last possible moment. If a school supply enters my thoughts before the end of August, I lose my ability to sustain the illusion that summer will last forever. When a school-related television commercial comes on, I mute the sound and pick up a book. On Sundays, I pull open the newspaper, scoop out the stacks of flyers, and dump them into the recycling bin. But despite all of my precautions, that ad for the 10-cent notebooks slipped through. I’m already feeling the chilly fall air.

Here’s yet another sign that “back to school” is big business: limited-edition Nike sneakers with designs inspired by school supplies, released just as students are headed back to class. Kids can pick from three different styles, each with the image of a schoolhouse or school bus bearing the Nike swoosh. My favorite is the black and white shoe that resembles a composition notebook, but maybe you’d prefer the bright-blue and orange of an Elmer’s glue bottle or the distinctive green and gold of a box of Crayola crayons.

Sneaker aficionados have gone gaga over the shoes, but education bloggers are mixed. On the Biz of Knowledge, Bill Belew questions the cool factor of wearing “crayon shoes” to school. But Alexander Russo of This Week in Education thinks the shoes have a good shot with kids, or at the very least with their parents.

One online store sells the back-to-school sneakers for $85 to $120, but on eBay, bids for the composition book shoe have already topped $160. This leaves me wondering just who the target market for these shoes is, schoolkids or the grownups in their lives?