School Family

When my 14-year-old started talking about the style of backpack she wants for school this year, I felt that buying it for her would be aiding and abetting the destruction of her posture. The backpack was
perfectly fine—it’s the combined weight of the books it will be holding that has me seriously considering homeschooling my children just so they’ll never have to leave the house with 75 pounds of textbooks on their backs.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says backpacks shouldn’t exceed 10 percent of the student’s weight. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that last year, my daughter’s backpack weighed more than she did by 10 percent. I’d be thrilled if she’d agree to a backpack on wheels, but those haven’t been acceptable since she was a 4th grader and all the girls towed their books down the hallways like tiny flight attendants. People have always been willing to sacrifice comfort for fashion, but overloaded backpacks on growing bodies aren’t just uncomfortable, they’re a health risk. There has to be a way for kids to study at home without paying for it with lifelong back pain.

What is it about some grownups that they can’t get within 10 feet of a child during the month of August without reminding the kid that school will be starting soon?

The other night, we were at a student art exhibit where my daughter’s work was on display when a man spied my 9-year-old son sprawled on a couch in the lobby, examining his thumb. My son put himself on the couch in a sort of protective custody after realizing he had just exhausted his parents’ patience by asking for the sixth time in approximately six minutes when we’d be leaving. So there he was, safe from my short temper, inspecting his thumb for any changes since the last time he was mortally bored, when a pleasant-faced man on his way out the door called over his shoulder, “So, what do you think of all those commercials on TV telling you school will be starting soon?”

My son, realizing the man was addressing him, sat up straight and asked the man what he’d just said. The man repeated himself. I watched my son’s expression rearrange itself from one of polite curiosity to acute anguish. The man might as well have approached my child with a pair of pliers to remove his fingernails.

I don’t believe the man was purposely being sadistic. But it would help if people like him remember what it’s like to be a kid in August, clinging to those last free days with the kind of frantic joy that comes from knowing each one is numbered. It’s hard enough to be a kid (what with being dragged out to your big sister’s boring old art exhibits and having your parents get all grumpy on you when all you want to know is when you’ll be going home). The last thing you need is some adult ruining your day by cheerfully reminding you just how soon those numbers will run out.

We’ve been having a lot of fun putting together Back2School2007.com—as much fun, I hope, as you’ve had exploring the site and using the content. We just added one more section with nine downloadable tools
that you can use in the coming weeks and throughout the year.

For parents, there’s a printable version of our comprehensive Back-to-School Checklist, a list of suggested questions for teacher conferences, and a multipurpose school note with check boxes for some common situations.
Your children might find the homework checklist and weekly schedule planner useful for keeping track of what’s going on. We’ve also included some tags and labels to mark their stuff, from backpacks to books to bag lunches, plus an incentive chart to get those kids reading. (It can even be used to track other kinds of activities…say, doing chores.)

All of the tools are in PDF format, so you can print them from any computer or even save the files for later.
And stay tuned for more new stuff throughout the site; I’ll be chiming in occasionally to tell you about it. In the meantime, if there’s anything you want to see that isn’t already here, post a comment below to let us know.

Enjoy these last few weeks of summer!

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?