thursday august 26,2010

the art and business of school supplies


back in the days of little house on the prairie, laura ingalls and her friends would go to school with a piece of coal fashioned as a pencil and a tablet of writing paper that Pa saved up for all year by doing extra harvesting in his neighbors yard. That is all laura needed and it served her well because she ended up marrying Almanzo(what was his name?) and all was right with the prairie.

when i was younger, my mom would take us to Drapkins..which was a stationary store in ridgewood. we went to town with binders and book covers and writing utensils and stuff we totally didnt need, but it was all new and shiny and we had to have it. Then, we would watch the us open and cover all of our books....some of us never ended up opening those beautifully covered books and some of us did rather well in school....

fast forward to my kids and their school suppplies. Really? are they serious? composition notebooks again? every year, they come home with the red one and the blue one and the black one and then the "color of their choice"(because the school wants to make them feel that they have a choice...)...and all of them only have between 2 and 5 pages used. Now, god forbid i should rip out those pages and let them reuse them again-that would be a tragedy and i might be arrested by child services. They need brand new composition notebooks. Fine, but that is the least of it.

Apparently, my children are being trained by the cia or the fbi because they need special spiral notecards and special folders with hidden compartments and special pencils and calculators and usb's and all of this other stuff....hmmmm, ziploc bags, container of coffee, pancake mix...wait a second-school supplies or breakfast for the teachers? (ok, i exaggarate, a bit...dont want to offend any teachers....especially the ones that have my sons....) I used to go to walgreens late at night when the manager would rather be smoking in the back than actually helping anyone and he would end up giving me everything on sale-it was a sweet deal. but now that walgreens is closed and i decided that the kids will have to hunt through the house for folders in fuschia, magenta, sunshine yellow and chameleon green(why those colors? who knows....i just do as i am told)

but in the end, no matter how much or how little they use the 5 thousand pencils that i have to sharpen for them in the pencil sharpener that came with our house that i think lauran ingalls might actually have used back in the day....i just want them to be happy and love school.

how is that for wishful thinking?

happy thursday