“Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”
The air is crystal clear and the sun sharp. Today is as lovely as yesterday though maybe a bit cooler. The back of my house, the last place the sun hits each day, is usually my refuge from the heat. This morning it’s chilly. Gracie just came inside for her morning nap. I’m surprised she didn’t sleep on the deck lounge. Earlier, the breeze was blowing the chimes hanging from trees in the backyard. I heard the sweetness of the smallest bells.
Yesterday I went to Staples. The place was crowded with parents holding lists, filling baskets and dragging kids from aisle to aisle. One mother asked her son if he wanted red or blue three ring binders. He told her he didn’t care. The boy had back to school blues and buying school supplies was about the last thing he wanted to be doing.
My mother bought the usual for our return to school. We always got new shoes, usually Buster Brown’s which were sturdy and lasted most of the year. If we had grown out of our uniforms, we got new blue skirts and new white blouses. My brother got new pants and white shirts. We wore ties with our uniforms, blue clip-ons that looked like cowboys might wear them to a hoedown for the girls and bow ties for the boys. We always got new ones because the old ties had been tossed at the end of the previous year. They took a beating because after school every day we’d stuffed them in our school bags for the walk home, and there they’d stay until the next morning. Pencil boxes and school bags were next on the list. I always liked shopping for those. My favorite pencil boxes had everything except duct tape: regular pencils, colored pencils, a small thin 6 inch ruler, a half circle ruler, a pencil sharpener and an eraser. My school bag had both a handle and a strap for over the shoulder. I used to try it on to see how it felt. We’d buy lined white paper with red margins and one Indian tablet. I remember I’d put all my supplies in and out of the school bag until I thought they were just right.
It didn’t matter whether we liked school or not on that first day. It was exciting to put on new clothes and shoes and walk to school. We’d discuss the teacher we were getting because we always knew. We alternated: one year a nun, the next year a real person.
Explore posts in the same categories: MusingsTags: Buster Brown, first day of school, pencil box, Pencil sharpener, school shopping, school uniform
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keepthecoffeecoming.blog 
August 23, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Warm and mostly sunny here today and the warmth will stay but the rain will come and replace the sun.
I loved buying all the new stuff for school 🙂 Since we always were in the same classroom every day I just threw everything in to the bag and arranged it in my school desk. We always had a real person 🙂 as a teacher and I doubt there were any special schools, like catholic, back then. Now days we have all kinds of different schools here.
Not long now 🙂
Have a great day!
Christer.
August 23, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Christer,
It was a great day all day today and is supposed to be the same most of the rest of the week. I went out and did an errand or two and it wasn’t too bad on the roads. I guess the crowds are thinning.
My desk was always mine as well in elementary school and the first high school i attended so I could keep all my stuff there. It made it so much easier. We had lockers too but they were mostly for coats.
Nope, only 4 days!
August 23, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Random thoughts: We never knew what teacher we were going to have until the first day of school. I remember one year my mother had me transferred out because the teacher was terrible. Since my aunt owned a children’s clothing store, we always had clothes picked out for our first day of school. The problem was it was often warm, and I can remember being dressed in a fall outfit and being very uncomfortable. I also had to wear special shoes, and I wanted penny loafers or mary janes. I won’t tell you about hiding my shoes. Today it is warm, and Jewels and I are hiding in the back bedroom which is the coolest. The Berkeley Cal students are returning…
Waving,
Lori
August 23, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Lori,
In elementary school each garde had two classes, one with a nun, one without so it was easy to know which teacher we’d get. High school was different as each teacher taught only one subject and there were lots of those. That was wait and see time.
The only day we didn’t wear uniforms was the first so we didn’t have to do too much clothes shopping. We got to pick our shoes but usually my mother steered us to expensive shoes she knew would last the whole year.
That’s me waving!
August 23, 2011 at 8:27 pm
It’s getting cooler here in North Texas it only reached 101 degrees this afternoon. It was hotter yesterday for the first day of school.
When I was a kid I always got a new pair of Keds hightop black sneakers, new Lee’s jeans and several T shirts. We never shopped for school supplies until the second day of school after we received the list from the home room teacher. Every year it was a surprise when we walked into the classroom and discovered who we had for a teacher that year.
My father’s great gripe about public school was that the teachers always assigned homework that required us to look up material in the “World Book Encyclopedia.” He was convinced that teachers only accepted work from that 21 volume set because teachers sold the sets during the summer to earn extra money. My father bought us the cheap encyclopedia that was sold in the grocery store one volume per week for a dollar each. I always felt that my report would never deserve a grade of A because the teacher knew that it came from a cheap encyclopedia. My father was a child of the depression and always looked for knockoffs of everything.
August 23, 2011 at 9:02 pm
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/britannica-concise-encyclopedia/id423543276?mt=8
Cheers
August 23, 2011 at 10:06 pm
Minicapt,
There’s an app for everything!
August 23, 2011 at 11:22 pm
The 20 volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica at your finger tips on your iPhone. That’s the miracle of technology today, and priced at only $19.95. My father would be rolling over in his grave, such a deal!
August 23, 2011 at 10:05 pm
Bob,
I’m watching the Sox play the Rangers and it 104° when the game began. None of the schools here are air-conditioned but it never gets as hot as yours do. Once in a while it might get to 80° then the kids just have to suck it up for the day.
Uniforms saved my mother a great deal of money. Trying to outfit 4 kids would have broken the bank.
We were never told where to look up the material. If we had to, we’d go to the library. We had those same encyclopedias. Ours had red covers, and my mother bought one every week. I used to like taking down different volumes and just reading them for fun.
My parents could never have afforded a whole set of a name brand encyclopedia.
August 24, 2011 at 8:22 am
I guess you and I turned out OK without a copy of the 20 volume World Book Encyclopedia. Amazing!
August 24, 2011 at 7:35 pm
http://tinkerboxnews.com/
Cheers
August 24, 2011 at 8:31 am
Bob,
I think we both turned out great!
August 24, 2011 at 11:18 am
Back in grammar school days, I felt “entitled” to a two level pencil box. In the drawer of the lower level was the ubiquitous 180 degree protractor. Don’t know what happened to them during the rest of the year, but I never seemed to accumulate more than one at any time. Also never really figured out what to do with them, other than make skinny “D” shapes. I’ll have to ask the kids if they remember protractors and whether they ever figured out a use for them. Still like wooden pencils, though…
August 24, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Bob,
Now that you’ve mentioned it I think a year or two I also had the double decker, but I always called the protractor the half circle thing because I didn’t know its name.
I still use wooden pencils too! Mine have a Red Sox logo.
August 24, 2011 at 4:25 pm
…the next year a real person. Yeah, that’s what it was like. And I remember the science guy who was soooo meek but funny lookin and able to keep all us kids longing for more science tricks. I think the nuns had a very limited repertoire. A mono tone. All that changed when we were in public high school.
So how many days from today?
August 24, 2011 at 5:18 pm
Z&Me,
I only had a bad experience with one nun in elementary school. In HS I had wonderful experiences. Some were among the best teachers I ever had. It was because of one I decided to be an English teacher.
I never thought of them as real because of those habits they wore!
August 24, 2011 at 9:40 pm
Our 8th grade teacher/principal, Sister Juda, could do this:
and also right side up and uʍop ǝpısdn – also in mirror image at the same time.
After seeing her do that, we knew she was not a real person.
August 24, 2011 at 9:58 pm
John,
I haven’t ever seen anyone do that and I’d agree she wasn’t real. The guy on the video could do it on the board, but I bet he couldn’t do it on paper. I can write backwards if the board is big enough but can’t on a small piece of paper.
August 24, 2011 at 10:03 pm
Minicapt,
Okay I’ll give that app a try but you have to remember I was an English major with minors in history and philosophy. I still think math and science are foreign languages.
August 24, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Just about packed?
August 24, 2011 at 10:53 pm
John,
All that’s left is the bus ticket back and forth to Logan and my spending money from the bank. I could go tomorrow. Three days and counting!