Back to school!

It seems that summer is well and truly over - it is the first day of school in my home town district 219, our short Friday summer hours end this week, and it's time for me to start thinking about new boots...

I am obsessed, for some reason, with back-to-school supplies. It was always my favorite part of going back to school - new clean spiral bound notebooks, reams of filler paper, pens(!) #2 pencils, trapper keepers, chandler's assignment notebooks, backpacks (and can I just ask WTF is with the kids now lugging around backpacks on wheels?? I carried all my crap for 12 years on my back, and I'm totally fine. Toughen up, already) all of that good stuff. Even now, I can happily spend a good solid hour in Staples or Office Max, just looking at all the great stuff. This doesn't mean I want to actually go back to school or like, have kids or anything. It probably just means I am very easily entertained.

I was also thinking about my first day as a high school freshman. I don't remember a lot about it - I had a good locker location B275, which is of course critical. There was a lot of ice-breaking going on that first day. I remember specifically having Spanish class mods 2-4 (oh, yes. We were on a mod system. Something else to throw the freshmen completely off track.) and our teacher, a young enthusiastic guy with a ponytail, got up on his desk and did a trust fall, backwards, onto us. Stop and think about this for a minute. Asking a bunch of freshmen, first thing in the morning, to catch you as you tumble backwards off your desk? That takes a LOT of trust (or foolishness?) Good thing he didn't try this move at the end of the year, as I think we all would have let him just fall. Seriously. He this kind of crunchy granola touchy feely, 'I'm THERE for you' kind of teachers. Really really earnest. I remember looking around at my classmates thinking nobody told me THIS was going to happen in high school. Are they ALL going to do this?? Fortunately, the other teachers just stuck to regular kinds of ice breakers and nobody else threw themselves bodily off of any furniture.