By Sadie Frank
Going back to school. It’s the subject of many texts and dreams and conversations across the nation. New year, new teachers, what’s it going to be like? I already know the way much of it is going to be: It’s going to be exactly like in the TV commercials that have been going on for ages. You know, you go shopping for school supplies, your parents marvel at the low prices unique to that singular store, you go to school and you make loads of friends. It’ll be like that, right? Wrong. It’ll be nothing like that.
In fact, the only similarity my school year will have to the ads is the shopping. The shopping for school supplies. It happens every year. I, being kind of a nerd, like the smell of new paper and the knowledge that there are new pencils and pens in my bag, and shopping for school supplies is always kind of fun for me. Until I start to feel guilty about how much money my mom is shelling out for my stuff.
My parents will marvel about the price of their daughter’s school supplies, although their marveling will probably be more along the lines of, “I can’t believe I’m buying her all this stuff for such exorbitant prices. I must be a complete sucker.†But they won’t be able to do anything about it.
School-supply stores have us in their pockets, because they know everyone shops for school supplies within the three weeks before school starts – and by then, they can’t wait for things to go on sale because school is starting and they’ve got to have pencils. This year, I made a promise to myself to go back to Staples or Office Max a week after school starts, find all the products I bought (on sale, as they undoubtedly are now that everyone’s bought their pencils) and do a complicated bit of adding and subtracting to find out how much I would have saved. I can bet that it’s going to be a significant amount of money.
Continuing on in the very interesting vein of school-supply dilemmas, I would like to take a minute to talk about binders. My sister, who’s going into her sophomore year, uses notebooks now, and has ever since she began high school; but I’m still using binders. I go through at least three binders a semester because, inexplicably, the rings get bent out of shape – no pun intended – and won’t close within a minute amount of time after they are bought. It’s been happening for ages, and it happens to all my friends as well. Binder companies need to create a binder that sticks, and that’s all there is to it – in fact, I’m thinking about staging a protest.
Even when you take into account the fact that school-supply shopping is a basically unnecessary action – I have stacks and stacks of notebook paper in my house, boxes of old pencils, and yet I buy them new each year – it’s still fun, still something to look forward to. Maybe that’s because it means that the start of school is imminent. It brings us out of our summer stupor and back into the life of a student. And what, may I ask, could be better than that?
Sadie Frank is a resident of Carrboro and a rising eighth-grader at McDougle Middle School.