And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that today (August 24) was the first day of the new school year for most Iowa children apparently, and radio and television were reminding us constantly, to an extent that seemed unusual. Is that because it is more of a universal early start day this year, thanks to Iowa law?
With no children or grandchildren, the start of school hasn’t meant much to me since the last time I started a school. That would have been the Navy’s aviation ground officers’ course in Florida in May of 1957.
Watching the inserts in the newspapers lately and some television ads there is evidence that “kids today” are being burdened, literally and figuratively, with heavy back packs. Some seemingly as big and as heavy as the kids themselves! Stealing from George Goebel, I never got a back pack. Through grade school and high school, I would not have known what to put in one, since only rarely did I take a book home.
I have no memory of where those early primers spend the night. I do remember being given a pencil “of my very own” in first grade (there was no kindergarten and certainly no pre-school class) and that pencil stayed at school at night, so we would not lose it.
At the high school level, we had desks with book wells in our home room. If we needed a book for a class to which we moved, we took that book and that book only along. I admit high school was easy for me, so any studying I had to do I could get done in the half-hour before the eight o’clock bell, or in the one hour study hall I had most days, or in part of the noon lunch hour, because we had a full hour at noon. I went home for lunch, just five blocks away, so had time to kill. Much of the time, we played a sport for part of the hour. “Country kids” brought a sack lunch (there was no school lunch program, but they could get milk.)
At university, after class registration was guaranteed, we were given a list of texts we would need for a class, and went to the book and supply store in Iowa City to purchase used ones, turned in and sold by the previous year’s class. In the morning, we would take the two or three books required for that morning’s classes and a multi-class spiral notebook, and head out. There were normally four or five classes each day, but never consecutive, so we could go home and trade the morning’s books for the afternoon’s books.
But there was a lot of homework, and any free hour was spent with one’s nose in a book someplace on campus.
Navy schools had manuals more than books, and we were either too tired mentally and physically for homework, or the course work was simple enough not to require it.
I have no idea what school children carry in those bags these days besides some books, which might be carried for show as much as need. Computer? Smart phone? Bottled water? Change of shoes? Change of clothes? Sets of pens and pencils in every color of the rainbow?