The lines in Target weren’t long
yesterday but they were slow. Each queue had at least one shopping cart with
thirty spiral notebooks, three packages of pencils, a half dozen packs of
notebook paper, a stack of solid colored folders, and boxes of crayons, pens,
and markers. I am intimately familiar with these items. They are the tools of
my trade.
Upon the receipt of a credit card, the
supplies were loaded into huge plastic bags with a red bull’s eye printed in
the center. The children accompanying the shopping carts and lumpy sacks of
supplies chattered about going back to school. They were excited and nervous in
varying degrees. Some were ready to go back to see their friends. The Hermoine
Grangers were ready for the challenge of the next year’s learning. Some didn’t
want summer to end. Their mothers, however, all looked ready for summer to end.
In a few days, those huge awkward bags
will be transported to school. I have seen mothers carry babies while pushing a
stroller filled with school supplies down the hall toward my classroom. The bags were dragged up a tall flight of
stairs to my room. A big sharpie sat next to the door to mark each sack with
the owner’s name and then put in the coat closet to be sorted. In an ideal
world, I had a student teacher to begin that process. Most years were ideal, in
that regard. The sorting of twenty-some piles of individual materials into some
sense of order for storing is rather like dropping huge jars of buttons and
dividing them by color, size, and number of holes.
First, out came the pencil box which
was labeled with the owner’s name via permanent marker. Into each box was added
one box of crayons. The owner then placed the box into her now no longer empty
desk. After that our room became a communist strong hold. The remainder of the
supplies was joined with everyone else’s.
Bins were filled with paper towels, Lysol wipes, tissues, and what we in
Room 203 called “hanatizer.” Some of these were left out on a set of child
height shelves so I would not have to stop what I was doing to get a new box of
tissues on a particularly snotty day. This is much better than being
interrupted by child holding his hand over his nose telling you the obvious,
that he needed a Kleenex. Stat!
Spiral notebooks and folders were sorted
by color and stored on a shelf. Yellow folders then would have “Bingo’s (or
fill in any name you like) Parents Folder written across the front. These would
have graded work and newsletters sent home each Friday. There were green
homework folders. Names were written on Red Reading Notebooks. In February, the
pretty pink and purple notebooks brought in each fall by seven year old girls
became poetry books for both genders.
Skinny brushes were pulled out of
paint boxes and put on the “free” table set up in the hall for some enterprising
individual who would put to a good use what was useless to me. They never stayed
on the table more than a day. Later in the year, thick water-loaded brushes
would create batik-like crayon resist paintings of whales, desserts, and the
solar system.
A forest’s worth of notebook paper was
divided between the Writing Center and a shelf where it was readily accessible
to everyone for whatever purpose.
Markers were stored higher and were saved for posters and special
projects. I am partial to crayons are they lend themselves to more creativity.
In my opinion, markers are on the same level as stick figures. They serve a
purpose, they come in handy, but they lack subtlety.
The good quality pencils were stored
in front of the cheap pencils that are sold for one cent as a loss leader in
the drug stores. Here’s my rant: Cheap pencils aren’t worth the penny you spend
on them! I have wasted hours and hours of my life sharpening those things only
to have to throw them away because the leads are not centered and you can’t
write with them. Or the lead is so loose, it breaks on the first letter. Or
even worse, there are dozens each year without lead at all. They – make - me - NUTS!
Even the empty sacks were put into a
bag o’ bags to be pulled out as an emergency backpack, to carry home the prize
winning pumpkin from the Halloween estimation station, or a raincoat for a walk
home after school in the pouring rain. They were inevitably used up before the
year was half over.
But before the sacks were stuffed into
my closet, they were given a good hard shake to get at what was hiding in the
bottom. What poured out with that shake were the hopes, often secret, of each
child and their parent for the school year: the wish for a best, best, best friend,
hopes for a teacher who really likes you (yes, the parents want the teacher to
like them, too), fun, and such exciting things to learn that your eyes bug out
just waiting for the lesson. Sometimes
the wishes were just there, unnamed, the desire for something good that causes
eager anticipation. The room filled with it as it wrapped itself around
everyone there, even the nervous Nelly and shy Stanley. It made us all giddy
with anticipation. Ah!
My wish for you is that your school
year be as grand, or better yet, even grander than your dreams.
