This is the season that I, and I think many of us, really celebrate the new year.
It’s the time of new notebooks, full of crisp, smooth, unmarked pages; pencils with sharp tips and clean erasers; folders devoid of duct-tape repairs. Desks are made ready, bulletin boards have space for new schedules; water bottles, sneakers and backpacks are labeled in Sharpie.
The beginning of the school year has always been, for me, the real time of fresh starts and new beginnings.
Now that my youngest is in high school, we’re past both the long supply list that I recall from my early years of having kids in school and the parent-organization sponsored service in which we ordered all their supplies from an approved vendor, and they were all in a box on their desk on the first day.
As much as I enjoy shopping for school supplies, you couldn’t beat the price — at least, not without a lot of effort — and you knew your child would both get exactly what they needed and that it would be the same as everyone else’s.
We’ve reached the age of teachers offering what they want students to have for their particular classes on the first day. You know, when all the school supply sales that started in July are over.
So we get the basics on sale: notebooks and pens and pencils and highlighters, and index cards in both 3x5 and 4x6, because there will inevitably be a project that requires a specific size of index card sometime in, oh, late January or early February, and we’ll hear about it at 8 p.m. the night before the cards are due.
And yes, that’s true even when most homework is completed on school-issued Chromebooks and turned in through Google Classroom.
If not, more recipe cards for me.
Maybe it’s obvious, but I like to be prepared. I wasn’t a Girl Scout for nothing.
My kids appreciate it. Sometimes. Like when they need those index cards. Otherwise, they wonder why I try to anticipate what they will need. After all, one teacher might insist that each student have a red pen for correcting work; another might want maps filled in with colored pencils, and only colored pencils. Why not just wait and see?
Because, like preparedness, flexibility is also a strength. What they need — what we all need — is both. Being prepared can help make you more flexible; if you have all the blue and black pens and No. 2 pencils and enough notebooks and looseleaf paper already corralled in a binder, then going out to find a specific brand of glue stick during the first week of school is much less overwhelming.
What I’m praying for for all students returning to classes, whether prekindergarten or graduate students, is the patience and fortitude to get through the overwhelming parts, because there will be overwhelming parts; the kindness and consideration to help their classes become real learning communities; and the courage they need to admit when they don’t know, or to volunteer for something others might see as uncool, or to befriend someone they didn’t know before. That is, the courage they need to learn the important lessons.