by: Shelly Simmons, a forty-something woman trying to live more like a thirty-something, probably failing but doesn’t know it because I’m too busy loving life!
As children headed back to school this week and I dutifully shopped for the school supplies our kids would need this year, my husband and I reminisced with them about supply lists from the 80’s and 90’s when we were in school. I remember they were much shorter and certainly didn’t ask us to bring in seventeen boxes of Kleenex (or however many boxes we are up to these days).
Just like kids still do today, I loathed going back to school shopping with my parents. Who cared about pencils and protractors when I only had days left to spend at the public pool? But there was always that one school item no kid would dare enter into the hallways without when we were kids. It was just that cool. A school supply item so popular that you just weren’t popular without one. So when my parents agreed to fork out their hard earned dough to get one for me, it almost made back to school shopping bearable for me and anyone who grew up in the early decades of...the Trapper Keeper!
If you had to stop reading to Google what a Trapper Keeper is, then join in with the lowly ranks of clueless children everywhere. Our eight year old believed a Trapper Keeper was a scorecard of some sort for a sporting event he couldn’t even begin to explain. Our 16 year old felt pretty confident that a Trapper Keeper was a cell phone that students could only use to make emergency calls.
You should have seen his face when I told him there were no cell phones in my house growing up. Mind. Blown.
I’ll bet if you asked your own school-aged children to guess what a Trapper Keeper is, their response may be just as far-fetched and hilarious as our kids’ responses were. Trapper Keepers were more or less the 80’s incarnation of the smartphone; the best way and pretty much only way to stay organized at the time as a kid. There was no such thing as a Remind 101 app. I had to write down my homework assignment in one of my trappers every single day and remember to do it on my own with my parents or a buzzing app reminding me.
In fact, school supplies in the ‘80’s were completely devoid of technology. The closest thing to an electronic device ever listed was a calculator and it wasn’t scientific and it didn’t graph anything out for you, either. But you could punch in 0-1-1-3-4 and turn it upside down for some useless entertainment for you and your friends when your math teacher wasn’t looking. Calculator spelling was an art form in my day and maybe that will be the next thing we share with our kids as when we take another trip down back to school memory lane.
If you were really good with your calculator, you could even insult your schoolmates with it. Want to learn how? Just 3-7-9-0-0-9 it.
