August 25, 2006

SCHOOL SUPPLIES

School starts in New York City in a little over a week. As my daughters and I went through the frenzy of buying school supplies and checking lists, a wave of nostalgia suddenly washed over me. It’s almost velada time, so my sensibilities are pointed toward my Assumption years, 1969-1981.

See how many of these school supplies your remember yourself:

Our rulers were likely the skinny transparent ones called ORION, that came in a light blue plastic sheath. There was the short kind, maybe 6 inches, and the foot-long kind. We also had those multi colored ones, that were harder plastic, but also broke more easily. Wooden ones were available, but I was afraid of the edge that was metal and could cut. In college, my friends taught me to glue or tape centavo coins to the back of the Orion which would elevate the ruler, so that when you used it to draw a line (mostly with pencil in math class), the pencil stain on the edge of the ruler would not mark up your paper!

Notebooks: In the early years, we had “Assumption” notebooks, with the Assumption logo in front. I especially remember our writing notebook, where each writing segment had three lines, the bottom two nearer each other, so that we had HUGE capital letters, and small lower case letters. And of course, who can forget our penmanship models, the ones we copied from diligently during our penmanship classes? Someone (I assumed it was one of the nuns) would write a sentence down on a writing paper, paste or staple that to cardboard, and individually wrap those sheets in plastic. We would then pick out a segment each to work on in class. The sentences went something like “Anna ate apples all afternoon” or “Beautiful birds bounced on branches above the babbling brook” so we got to practice each letter several times in a sentence. I've made "writing sheets" for my girls using the computer, and have started to teach them Assumption writing (American cursive is just ugh!) Sad to say, I hear that they no longer teach penmanship at Assumption today? We also had an assignment notebook. It had grids inside, where you wrote down the subject, the date, the homework instructions itself. There was also a box for your parent to initial, to make sure you did your homework! Those notebooks disappeared after our early years, especially after II (Individualized Instruction) got instituted.

In high school, my favorite notebooks were CORONA brand, which were spiral, and had shiny royal blue covers. I would cover the “crown” logo on each notebook with a cute Snoopy sticker. This sticker thing became quite a trademark for me that my U.P. classmates could identify my notebooks from afar because of it. Another popular brand was CATTLEYA. There was a time where it was “uso” to twist away the spiral, then sew the holes up, so now you no longer had a spiral notebook but a flat hand-bound notebook!

Paper: There was such a thing as Grade 1 paper, Grade 2 paper, Grade 3 paper and so on. It was marked in the back of the pad what grade paper it was. How curious that was, now that I think about it! I'm not sure but was it starting in Grade 4, when we now needed several kinds: Intermediate pad paper, ½ lengthwise, ½ crosswise, and ¼ sized pads? And we lugged all 4 kinds to school everyday. We also had a special kind of "lengthwise" pad for spelling, and another special one for "talasalitaan" in Pilipino class.

Pencil box: We could probably write a book about pencil boxes, can’t we? I remember the Japanese kinds, that closed with a magnetic kind of latch. There were those with just one layer, and the fancier ones with several layers, and even secret compartments! My aunt used to get me fancy German ones in Europe, where one side was for pencils, erasers, ruler, and the other side had a complete set of color pencils! When I see those today, I still have the compulsion to buy – all these many years later. At some point, it was Sanrio of some kind, at another point, it was a plain, clear plastic envelope type, that we just decorated with stickers. I also remember the hard plastic boxes, that looked like elongated soap cases. It came semi-opaque in different colors, and again we decorated and personalized each with stickers and dymo-tape labels.

Pencil: Was there any other than Mongol for our first few years of school? Only later did the Snoopy, Mickey Mouse, and Hello Kitty pencils come. We also had the non-sharpening kind, where you just pulled out the used nib, and tucked it away at the bottom to reveal the fresh nib up top. Those were called BENSIA pencils. What grade were we when it became “uso’ to shave away all the yellow paint from the pencil so now you were left with something that looked like a brown twig? (And how did we shave them, with a razor blade?) Most classrooms had a sharpener screwed on to some ledge with a garbage can underneath it. Or we had our own little portable ones tucked away in your pencil case. My favorite sharpener was a silver metal one, that came in a case with spare blades. The cute ones usually did not last long or did not sharpen well.

BALLPENS: When were we first allowed to use ballpens? The very first kinds were BIC. Remember when the barrel only came two ways: solid yellow orange, or transparent white. My brother loved to take our BIC pens, cause he would convert the barrel into a blow gun using wet toilet paper as pellets, (ouch!) After the BICs came MONGOL, and I believe the barrel of that brand was ribbed, and if you were not careful, you got awful kalyos on your writing fingers from those. There was a time when we played with those ballpens and "melted" the barrels over candle flames and twisted them to make our ballpens fancier. If you were not careful and melted or twisted it too much, then the pen would not write anymore! Vivian Honorio and cousins also had this blown glass pen barrel that we all bought from them (or made pabili!) You just took the ink tube from any regular ballpen and put it inside this glass barrel. You now had a fancy pen, that is until you whacked it too hard and the entire thing broke into many pieces! My favorite simple ball pen, even to this day, is PAPERMATE. I like the one that comes in the blue-green colored barrel. For me, my handwriting looks best when written with this simple Papermate. (Who does handwriting anymore, anyway??) Later on, this new felt pen called FLAIR came out. I still love those! In late grade school, the Japanese (of course!) came out with these pens of rainbow colors, with matching smell! My favorite “exotic” color was turquoise. They also came out with pens with erasers at the end, thus erasable ink was born (how soon after did the crooks figure out they could now erase amounts on checks and change them in their favor?) Did you have that pen with the huge barrel, maybe 1 inch in diameter, that had a gazillion colors in it? The barrel was transparent, and you could pick which color you wanted to use. The idea was novel and interesting, but impossible to write all day with that pen! And did we not check each other's work with a red ballpen? And so did the teachers, they even used FLAIR so your mistakes would be marked even more glaringly!

ERASERs: Again, could occupy a chapter in the pencil box novel! Let’s start with the “ugly” kind, if you made the mistake of buying it. There was the half white-half gray kind, can’t remember the brand. If you were left with nothing else to use but this, and you rubbed too hard, there would be a hole in your paper. My favorite erasers, once again, were made by the Japanese. Whoever managed to invent erasers with smell, and those erasers that looked like nougat, with stars or flowers embedded in the eraser body (you know what I’m talking about!) was genius. I actually saved allowance money to buy new erasers. Today, my 8 year old is as obsessed with erasers as I was (must be a genetic trait.) But the choices today are even more mind boggling than our time (I used to think of my eraser obsession as a “simple joy” of childhood.) My daughter has erasers that look like real food (think fake food displays in a Japanese sushi bar) and erasers that smell like the food they depict. While I actually used the erasers I collected, my daughter won’t let anybody near hers! I just warn her about excessive eraser sniffing (recounting the Tita Vina story where my sister sniffed too hard and required a session of tweezer extrication from her nose.)

SCHOOL BAG: In our early grades, there was an Assumption school bag. It was blue vinyl, and open on top, with transparent handles, and no wheels. The only ones with an Assumption bag on wheels were Gigi and Babita Anido who had theirs custom-wheeled! The more common school bag of our childhood was a squarish one, which had a flat sealed top. Working in a law firm some years ago, I recognized what is known as a “court bag” in legal circles, as our school bag of decades ago! Our bags came in different sizes, and different colors from black to red to green to a bright kind of blue. Because the tops were flat, many of use chose to use the bag as a seat while waiting for our rides home. Therefore, sometime towards the middle of the school year, it was not uncommon to see super lopsided bags that had seen many hours of use as chair! I can’t remember what school bags I used in high school, but it was certainly not the back pack that is now the uniform of school kids all over the world, it seems. When we were about Grade 5 or Grade 6, on top of the regular school bag, some of us brought an “Ace” bag to school. What we put in there, I can’t remember! But some of us actually stuffed notebooks in there. How? I don’t know, cause some of those Ace bags were tiny!

Our markers were called PENTEL, our water colors were called GUITAR or PRANG, the glue was good old Elmers or DUCO cement. We even played with Duco cement by spreading a thin layer on our palms, letting that dry and peeling it off, and this dried glue now looked like skin, complete with the lines of your palm. Our paste came in color plastic tubes, or a round container with a well in the middle that housed the brush. And if massive pasting was needed, then the cook just made up a big batch of gawgaw (cornstarch) that made the best paste for paper mache projects! And the best crayons then as now are CRAYOLA. We also used pastels called CRAYPAS. Bond paper: did any of you call bond paper “KOKOMBOND” like my yaya? I still don’t know how to spell it. But I’ve read somewhere that the term KOKOMBOND was actually a Tagalog contraction of the term “coupon bond.” I loved the shiny ART paper, where one side was glossy and colored, and the other side was white. There was also CONSTRUCTION paper, which was the same dull, matte color both sides, and heavier than ART paper. And for our projects, we had CARTOLINA, which was stiff but soft enough to roll. And to remove the “roll” once you were in school, you just simple rolled it the other way in, and it straightened itself out! Stiffer still was ILLUSTRATION board, which was black on one side and white on the other.

Can you forget carbon paper? I loved to play with carbon paper, even if we did not actually use in school (okay, we did, in sewing class, to make blouse patterns with, using that little wheel with teeth.) I am sure my kids will say “Huh?” if I gave them a piece of carbon paper today!

I loved going on school supply shopping trips. Everything was going to be crisp and clean and new, even if of course it meant that summer was almost over, and school days were at hand. We went to many places for supplies over the years: Unimart, Alemars, National Bookstore, Philippine Education (PECO). Many years later, my aunt discovered a store along Ongpin in Chinatown, where we would buy in bulk for me and my siblings and cousins who were now of school age too. I cannot remember the name of this store (maybe Corona, like the notebook?) but what fascinated me most was this system they had of sending money to the cashier to make change. They had rigged this pulley system throughout the store. A salesperson would ring you up from any counter (painstakingly writing down everything you bought on a receipt book), take your money and the receipt, put these inside some kind of canister, seal the canister, then send it shooting through the pulleys to the “cajera” somewhere in the middle of the store, who would now ring up the sale on the cash register, put your change and receipt back in the canister, and shoot this back to you. By the time this was done, your purchases were wrapped up nicely, and off you went. I loved those buying trips. In the States, if you go to one of the warehouse clubs like BJ’s or COSTCO, see if you find that kind of pulley system rigged up. I’ve seen it in a few stores, but they use a vacuum and air to shoot the canisters from the cash registers to the cash office!

Looking at some of the supplies my daughters use, it seems like some of them have been around forever, but I am sure we did not have them while we were in school, (maybe they were not even invented yet?) like Post-its and highlighters. I seem to remember Liquid Paper, but even before that, do you remember those white sheets that you inserted into the typewriter, so it would type in white to cover your mistake? And of course, most of our typewriters were manual or simple electric, that you could carry around with you. Once in an antique store, I saw an old fashioned typewriter, so I excitedly called my jaded children to show it to them. And back then, most of the paperwork we got in school were "mimeographed" and were not "Xerox copies."

Now my daughters have “marble composition notebook” on their supply lists. They used to come in just black and white, but now they come in various colors. Of course, I am bored with how they look, so I’ve taught the twins about cute stickers and stuff, and so the habit has been passed on to the next generation. :)

10 Comments:

At May 15, 2008 5:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi - wonderin gif you could tell me where I could secure a copy of the Assumption penmanship guide as I would love for my daughter to develop beautiful penmanship as well. I cannot agree with you more that American penmanship is hideous and round. Thanks!

 
At May 15, 2008 10:42 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is no penmanship guide that I know of. But you just gave me an excellent idea. I will ask my friend with "excellent" Assumption penmanship to make an Assumption alphabet guide that I will post here. All our children should have such beautiful penmanship!

 
At April 13, 2009 11:50 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi! I was just wondering if I can ask for a copy of the penmanship guide for my daughter & nieces. Thanks so much!

 
At September 23, 2010 10:12 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi. I would like to know if you were able to ask your friend to make an Assumption alphabet guide already? Thank you!

 
At September 23, 2010 12:06 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Assumption penmanship guide to be available soon. I will post here when it is ready, and where you can get it!

Monica

 
At September 25, 2010 8:15 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you very much!

 
At October 01, 2010 2:34 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

May i ask for the penmanship guide too? Where can we view it? Thanks

 
At May 04, 2012 9:12 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've been looking for samples of Assumption penmanship for a long time. My niece said they aren't taught in school anymore. Is the penmanship guide already available? Where can I view it? Thanks.

 
At August 09, 2012 7:57 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

May I ask for a penmanship guide too. Thank you very much!

 
At January 23, 2016 5:51 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi! Can I also ask for a penmanship guide too? I would really like to learn to write beautiful curaive penmanship. :) Thank you in advance! :)

 

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