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By Liz Quirin

Ready for the First Day of School

Nothing can be more exciting than the first day of school — at least that’s true for some students and teachers and most parents. I remember those days as a student, a teacher and a parent.

As a student, buying school supplies meant choosing fresh notebooks, pencils if you were in the lower grades and pens if you had reached that rarefied air of junior and senior high school and college. As a teacher, shopping for supplies in the fall meant a great adventure was about to begin. I still like to “test drive” a pen to see if it feels right, whether it will glide over the paper to make taking notes easier and possibly more exciting.

As a parent, I watched my children select their supplies, digging through a stack of folders with my daughter to make sure she found the “right” ones for class. Pencil cases and different types of binders interested my son more than folders. The more ways to open and close the item, the better he liked it. We spent lots of time looking at paper, erasers, note pads and notebooks. With their pack-rat instincts, we still have some of those notebooks from elementary school with their half-filled assignments and notes about homework.

The same rituals of preparing for school have just been finalized with everyone back at school or just about ready to step across the threshold of classrooms everywhere. From kindergarten to college classrooms, everyone who needs to buy a pencil, pen, notebook, protractor, calculator or even a laptop should be ready to go.

Now the question arises: What will happen to those wonderful new supplies that were carefully selected in preparation for that very first day? Some will disappear through loss or loan, never to reappear again. Some will be recycled early as the wrong size, the wrong color, the wrong cover or just plain “wrong.” The favorites will, in time, be covered with stickers or other art work, easily distinguishable as belonging to one student or another. A new lunch box will eventually suffer from being jammed into a locker or tossed around one too many times. That comes later, of course, maybe next week or the week after that.

But these heady first days of school must be cherished and relished. It is, after all, the beginning of a great new adventure, a time when all things are possible, when everyone’s slate is still clean, when the time to make a first impression as a student and as a teacher spins hope and promise around the classrooms. What could be better than new school supplies, eager students and competent, faith-filled teachers ready to discover great and wonderful truths about themselves and the people in their classes? Absolutely nothing. Have a wonderful adventure this year.