At a family dinner the other night, the week before school started, the Young Relative was critically reviewing his middle-school class schedule on his phone. Things looked good, he said: in particular, his classes were clustered together so he wouldn't have too far to walk between rooms. This, apparently, is a priority.
As usual, the Unionville-Chadds Ford district (to my mind, the equivalent of a private school anywhere else) is offering up an admirable curriculum: he's taking an advanced math class that his father and I didn't take until high school. And I can't imagine what they'll be able to teach him in his "Digital Communication" class that he doesn't already know. I proposed that for a hands-on project he could teach his elders how to use their cell phones. To that suggestion I got the classic Young Relative eye-roll that he perfected at the age of 5.
And back in our day, did we have these long lists of brand-specific school supplies that parents have to spend hours tracking down? I don't think so, but it's possible my mother just went out and bought them with no fuss. What we did get was a new pair of school shoes, a new pair of gym shoes, a lunchbox (always a tough decision: "Mod Squad" or "The Monkees"? What would the cool kids be carrying?), some spiral notebooks, and rolls of Contact paper we'd use to make covers for our school books (you didn't strip off the backing). It would last the whole year and it came in cool designs -- this was the Seventies, after all!
Parenthetically: for our pre-back-to-school dinner we had crab cakes from Pappas Seafood in Baltimore. They are without question the best I've ever had. You can pick them up at the restaurant or order them online (PappasCrabcakes.com) and have them shipped.
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