25 Things You Used to Love About Going Back to School

Why don't our shoes light up anymore? Shouldn't this be a competitive advantage that shoe companies could leverage in the adult marketplace? We would have felt so much safer in college if we knew that our shoes were acting as precautionary lights, warning drivers of our drunken idiocy as we stumbled home from a night of debauchery. Now, when you go out to the club, sure you can peacock by putting on a cool hat or some jewelry, but can any fashion choice stand up to the beautiful elegance of light up shoes? There are many ways that the tastes of our childhood selves were far superior to our current predilections, but walking away from light up shoes might have been the biggest mistake we made as a generation.

Science class was usually awful. You rarely got to mix chemicals together like all the kids did in science classes on TV shows. Before you could do any kind of dissection, the teacher had to make sure that no one had weak stomaches or religious objections. One cool thing that even the most politically correct schools allowed were water rockets. You truly knew spring was finally here when the class was hauled outside for an afternoon of posing as an amateur aquatic NASA. Whether your rocket soared with the ease and grace of an empty whiskey bottle thrown off of an overpass or sputtered to the ground like an empty whiskey bottle dropped from your stepfather's Lay-Z-Boy, these were good times. Of course, you also had to learn about the science behind the rockets afterwards, but that was never too hard to tune out.

We don't exactly miss Jnco Jeans. These billowing pants did nothing but make us trip over our own feet and create pictures that we're still embarrassed to look at over a decade later. What we miss is the absolute freedom to dress terribly. With adulthood comes standards. Even if you have a "creative job," you're still judged on the cut of your jeans and the depth of your v-neck. There was a beautiful time between early elementary school when your parents picked out the clothes for picture day and high school when you realized that you'll have to have some fashion standards if you want to get laid, and Jnco Jeans represent that time for an entire generation. Along with dumb T-shirts with suggestive sayings, camo cargo shorts, and the rest of our middle school fashion faux pas, Jnco Jeans remind us of a time when we actually didn't care what we looked like, even if we thought we did.

How many of you have had something stolen from you in the last year? Whether it be a phone, a jacket, or a sandwich, how much easier would it be to recover our lost items if we had initials etched into all of our belongings? There was no way that some sly classmate could accidentally "mix-up" your backpack with theirs in the hectic rush from the classroom to the bus. If they did, they would have explain how a guy named Clayton ended up with a backpack bearing the initials "BMG." Of course, this is just one of the things that were much simpler back in the day, but it is enough to tempt us to invest in a label maker so that we can mark all of our gear.

Books were definitely better back in the day. Though there are a number of elementary school-level books that we remember fondly, with characters as unforgettable as Waldo or Clifford the Red Dog, none mixed knowledge and fun quite as deftly as Miss Frizzle and the gang. Whether they were taking a journey through the human body or the solar system, there was always a sparkle of fun in the Magic School Bus series that other educational books couldn't muster. Miss Frizzle also offered a valuable life lesson to those who read through her series. By the time you got to college, you knew not to write off that eccentric professor before you got to know them. Though he might have chalk all over his patched blazer and mutter sonnets to himself as he walks down the halls, he also might have some dope stories to tell. Maybe he wouldn't be able to take you on a magic journey in a colorful bus turned rocket ship, but he might have some dank weed to share with you in some supply closet while you talked about Keats.

Don't get us wrong, the school bus was awful. The smoky old lady behind the wheel, the rough leather seats that barely covered ancient rusted springs, and the angry older kids, bitter as hell that they weren't driving didn't exactly make for a pleasant experience. There was one great thing about the bus. Before there was Pitchfork and the legions of music blogs that followed, the school bus was the place to discover new music. In the half hour that you were trapped on the bus en route to and from school, you could be introduced to entirely new genres. It was best to discover a new band on the way home from school though, as you had to suffer through an entire day without your new jams if you heard them on the way in, unless you wanted to have your Discman confiscated and earn yourself a trip to the principal's office.

We know that these things are roughly a thousand times better for the environment than your standard milk carton, but that isn't what made us fall in love with them. Milk pouches are just begging to be used as props in the ongoing gag that is lunch period. You could stage re-enactments of how you got to second base, use the straws as barrels for dairy guns, pound the bags as hard as you could to see what they could withstand: whatever you did with these pouches was awesome unless it involved drinking milk from them. Of course, the crusade to save the environment was set back significantly when administrators got sick of all of the dairy goofing and brought back cartons, environment be damned. But, while you had them, lunch was that much more interesting.

It was difficult to view the PTA as anything other than a place that your mother went to gossip and eat snacks once a month. The one time that the PTA delivered anything that affected you in the least was when they brought new playground equipment to the school district. Suddenly, all of those Wednesdays of leftover Tupperware dinners were worth it. You would walk out the doors at recess to see the old wooden, rusted monstrosity replaced with a slick new playground, complete with numerous tube slides and monkey bars. Who doesn't long for the days of playing on the playground? Now that you're older, the standards of society and the fear of being branded a child predator keep you off of the playground. What we wouldn't give for one more trip down the big slide. And yes, there was always a big slide.

We don’t care how cynical a kid you were, the earnest charm of Bill Nye was more than enough to melt the heart of even the most jaded, backwards hat wearing skateboarding nu-metal loving student. It is a testament to the Science Guy’s enduring popularity that he will appear on the next season of Dancing With the Stars with Snooki, and he is getting just about as much blog ink as the orange-tanned guidette. Unlike many educational TV hosts out there, Nye is actually legit. Some of Bill’s post-Science Guy accomplishments include developing a sundial for use on a Mars rover, extensive advocacy against global warming, and patents on a ballet slipper and a magnifying glass.

For some reason, pudding is one of the only snacks we've largely left behind in childhood. You still run into truckers grabbing from the shelf of gummis at every gas station, and Oreo cookies make an appearance at many drunk parties, but you rarely peep pudding in an adult fridge. We're not sure why that is, but looking back at our days of scarfing down pudding packs is enough to make us think its time to revisit Bill Cosby's favorite dessert. There is no better lunch time bargaining chip than a pudding cup. Even adjusted for inflation, we're told that you can still get three whole sandwiches, four bags of chips, or an entire tube of Chips Ahoy in exchange for one Snack Pack. As of press time, several struggling European countries were reportedly considering a switch to a pudding-based currency to shore up their financial woes.

Okay, sure, these things had almost no practical value, but that was what was beautiful about them. You only used them for class once a year to put the finishing touches on your collage for art class, but you begged your mom to get you three different styles from Wal-Mart anyway. What these scissors lacked in practical application, they made up for in "fun when you're board" value. There was no better way to distract yourself from fractions and integers than to cut up your worksheets with wavy lines and teeth-patterned snips. Besides, there have been many other useless things we've bought in our lives that have been a lot less fun.

Folders in adulthood are probably the most boring things imaginable. They are generally an ugly manila or a sickly green and they contain things like legal documents and dentistry records. As children, folders were amazing. There was a time when you could get pretty much any design imaginable on your Trapper Keepers, from the logo of your favorite sports team to a ridiculous piece of abstract art. Sure, the Trapper itself offered nothing in terms of practicality that the standard 89 cent blue binder didn't, but before you fully appreciated sneakers and cars, the Trapper Keeper was the status symbol that separated the coolness haves and have nots. It was a sad day inded when you graduated from the colorful Trapper Keeper to the bland, but better built Five-Star Binders. Looking back on it, that may have been our first step into adulthood.

Sure, you can eat chicken nuggets for dinner now, but that just signifies that you are a bachelor and nobody loves you. Back in the day, chicken nuggets were the best thing that could possibly happen to your lunch time. While every school had a different worst meal, whether it be rubbery Salisbury steak, water-logged hot dogs, or spaghetti that was somehow burnt, no school in the history of schools ever screwed up chicken nuggets. Sure, they didn't quite have the deliciously artificial taste that made McDonalds nuggets so irresistible, but a day away from mystery meat or sloppy joes was a day worthy of celebration.

You reaped two major benefits when they hauled some haughty old actor in to play a Founding Father for a half-baked historically themed assembly. Of course, it was great to miss legitimate coursework to listen to him stumble over questions like "Did you own slaves?" and "Did your wife have a job?" It was also our first taste of failure. On career day, parents were obligated to put their best foot forward and pretend their job was awesome. But, there was no way that a child older than five could watch the old Ben Franklin mimic shuffle into his beat up Honda Civic, pull out a Marlboro Red for the road, and peel out of the parking lot, and think, "There goes a man who has it all figured out."

There are few video games that we have ever played that are less impressive than Oregon Trail. The original Mario Bros. for Nintendo feels like Heavy Rain compared to the simplistic game play on the Trail. We remember Oregon Trail so fondly because we got to play it in school. Being allowed to play video games in school was a coup the likes of which we hadn't seen before, and many of us never saw again after. It would have been like watching Beavis and Butthead as part of an social studies course or studying 50 Cent songs in music class. Yet, there we were navigating our pixelated Conestoga wagon through dense forests and raging rivers. Even when you died of some terrible, long-extinct disease, you still won.

Though Lunchables were the bane of all parents' existence, children loved them. It would never be enough for mom to cut some thin slices off of a block of chedder cheese, grab some turkey from the pantry, shove a few Ritz crackers in a Ziplock bag and call it a day, yet Lunchables were more than enough. Social convention dictated that the coolest kids’ parents would spent $3.50 on a cardboard box containing foods that could be bought for 75 cents outside of the yellow Oscar-Mayer box. The young mind has no concept of value, you just knew that if Saturday morning cartoons and the cool kids both told you to buy something, then it must be awesome. The good people at Lunchables Corporate must have laughed all the way to the bank when they managed to brand crackers and cold tomato sauce as a “pizza” dish. Many of us have Lunchables to thank for introducing us to conspicuous consumption. Without the Lunchable, would we be capable of wasting so much money on sneakers and graphic t-shirts today?

Before you were old enough to fall in love with dodge ball, the parachute was the king of gym class. It was all the sweeter when you got to get your parachute on because early elementary school gym activities are usually about as stupid as can be. Finally, after months of square dancing and Duck, Duck, Goose, you are treated to the beautiful, colorful parachute. Granted, we never fully understood the callisthenic value of sitting under a large tent, but we would much prefer an afternoon of parachuting to the P90X and Insanity workouts that dominate our workout regimens today.

The last few years have seen the rise of adult dodge ball leagues. Now, we have no criticisms of the weekend warriors who follow up their semi-competitive dodgeball with a case of beer and icing down those aging knees, but it just isn't the same. In grade school, dodgeball was school-sanctioned catharsis. That kid who cut in front of you in the lunch line or stole your homecoming date could finally get his comeuppance, just so long as you could avoid becoming the target of that kid who you ripped off in a Pokemon card trade a few months back. Sadly, the heyday of dodgeball is coming to an end in many school districts. The game is admittedly a hotbed for bullying and as a result, many kids are being encouraged to do jumping jacks and other lame ass shit instead of engaging in what really is America's school-age pastime. As far as we're concerned, bullying is going to happen anyway, and it feels better to get hit by an inflatable red ball than by a fist.