1. Sitting in one of these not-so-comfortable classics (which were even worse if you had long hair and had strands of it get stuck in the fasteners):
2. If you took the school bus, then going to school in a bus that looked like it had the engine of a semi truck and that spewed out huge clouds of black smoke from the exhaust:
3. Keeping your homework and papers organized in your awesome (and essential) Trapper Keeper:
4. And making sure that you had cool portfolio folders to put inside your Trapper Keeper:
5. Also, thinking it was awesome that there were all sorts of useful charts inside your portfolio folders, and then, forgetting they were even there and never using them:
6. Knowing that the fluorescent color Crayola Crayons were unmatched:
7. Not being able to resist sniffing your Mr. Sketch markers whenever you used them. And also, having to be careful pulling them in and out of the box because the Styrofoam container they came in would start falling apart easily:
8. Getting excited to start a new Beverly Cleary book — especially because Norman Rockwell-looking illustrated covers really sold them to you:
9. Having to put your chair upside down on your desk every day when class ended:
10. Your teacher using an array of pull down maps when teaching geography:
11. And learning about the USSR, but having no idea what it was other than it was another name for Russia:
12. Getting the perfect sharpened pencil from one of these and distracting the entire class with the chainsaw noise it made in the process:
13. Or, if your classroom had an electric pencil sharpener (which was usually on the teacher's desk), being amazed at how it perfectly sharpened your pencil in 0.2 seconds:
14. The occasional chalk screech sound your teacher would make when she pressed too hard on the chalk while writing on the chalk board:
15. Being scared you were going to smear the ink on the transparency sheet if you were called on to write something on the overhead projector:
16. Having your classroom be decorated in cursive writing bulletin board sets (which did come in handy to look at for a reference when you had to write in cursive):
17. Classrooms and the library being decorated with cool-ass "Read" posters:
18. Playing during recess and lunch on metal jungle gyms that were probably a lot more dangerous than you realized:
19. Carrying your lunch in your cartoon lunchbox that always, for some reason, smelled like warm sandwiches and plastic:
20. And also bringing a Hostess treat for dessert:
elementary school student in the 1980s:
21. Hating the terrible powder soap they used in the restrooms:
22. Remembering to just say "NO":
23. Wanting to go through the D.A.R.E. program just for the T-shirt:
24. Taking your annual hearing test with these rubbery plastic headphones:
25. Chewing disclosing tablets so that you could see how good a job you were doing at brushing your teeth:
26. Reading a bunch of books to get your free Pizza Hut pizza:
27. The feeling of pure joy you got whenever you got a gold star on an assignment:
28. And the even bigger feeling of joy you got from getting a scratch 'n' sniff sticker for answering a question right in class:
29. The absolute struggle it was to use the school-provided scissors — which really just ended up hurting your hand:
30. Having to fight the urge to not use your wooden ruler as a sword during class:
31. Owning cool erasers that basically were useless because they couldn't erase anything and instead would just smear everything:
32. Putting pencil toppers on your pencil and then having trouble writing with them because of the weight distribution:
33. Learning how to multiply on a math keyboard:
34. Getting to use a TI-108 calculator, which was fun just to play with on its own:
35. Feeling super special whenever you earned a much coveted Weepul:
36. Playing The Oregon Trail during computer lab time...
...and then having to make the tough choice of who to play...
...before eventually dying of dysentery:
37. Remembering to NEVER touch the middle of a floppy disk:
38. Getting super excited whenever your teacher put on Reading Rainbow:
39. Or when you got to learn how to paint trees and mountains:
40. The excitement you felt each month when your teacher passed out Troll and Scholastic book order forms:
Who Remembers Ordering From Scholastic? #Scholastic #Books #Book #Reading #Childhood #Memories
And immediately circling every book and poster on the form.
41. Having a whole bunch of random bookmarks that you got with your Scholastic orders:
42. And some random Garfield bookmark that you didn't even know how you got:
43. The stress you felt as you carefully tore the sides off dot matrix paper:
44. Walking around to the Ghostbusters theme song and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" during your Halloween parade:
45. Bringing plastic strawberry baskets from home (that you were asked to save and bring in) so that you could do craft projects with it — like Easter baskets:
46. Checking out a book at the school library and immediately checking to see all the names of the kids who checked it out before you:
47. Looking through very old copies of Dynamite magazine that the school library kept in its "magazine section":
48. Bringing one of these bad boys with you on hot days:
49. Trading Garbage Pail Kids cards during recess and lunch:
50. And lastly, getting burned with the seatbelt on hot days when your parents came to pick you up after school.
