Where are all the school supplies?
I FOUND MYSELF having one of those “old fogey” parental moments earlier this week. You know, the kind that begins with the words “When I was a kid … ”
I uttered this time-honored phrase to my high school freshman as we waited in a line of cars waiting to turn into the driveway of the relatively small parking lot of an Office Depot store in Dublin.
Was there some amazing sale taking place? Were they giving away free laptops, perhaps?
Nope. It was just the first day of school, and a lot of parents — including this one — had to take kids to the office supply store because teachers just let them know that day what students would need for the rest of the year. Oh yeah, and they needed everything by the next day.
Through my grumbling about yet another trip to buy school supplies (at least our middle school child was given a list we were able to fill before school began) I found myself drifting back in time to the classrooms in which I was educated. I can still vividly remember getting up from my desk and walking to the back of the classroom, where cabinets were stocked with lined and construction paper, pencils and gigantic jars of paste and paint. We could just help ourselves.
It was a given that schools would have all of the supplies students would need for math, history, penmanship and science.
Thus, I found myself telling my son more or less that … when I was a kid, we didn’t have to pay for anything other than school clothes and a new lunchbox.