Nothing quite says fall like the sight and smell of new school supplies. Take a deep whiff of the wood of a pencil and its shavings or the assembled cleverly-named contents of a 64 pack from Crayola, and those days of mourning for a waning summer and fretting over the possibilities of the coming academic year will flood over you again.
Some of us have never quite escaped those days from childhood. They call us teachers. Over the course of the last week, my colleagues and I in a certain DC public school have toiled over plans for the first week of school, had our own array of back-to-school anxious dreams, and finally today received the much-anticipated delivery of new school supplies to our spaces. They smell like hopes and dreams, representing a fresh start for all this fall. Tabula rasa, my friends, for the little people, for us who so desire to see their desires for themselves fulfilled, and for an historically challenged urban school system that now unreservedly embraces renewal.
