It has to be fuchsia!

Yes, in just a couple of weeks the local stationeries and office supply stores will be overrun with parents and school-age children, all of them hell-bent on pillaging through the otherwise orderly aisles and shelves in a frantic search for their annual haul of school supplies.

It’s supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year —and there is even a popular TV commercial to prove it — but there lurks an ugly side to the happy back-to-school experience, and it comes in the form of the dreaded supply lists handed to each student on the first day of class.

Never mind all the weepy sentimentality and woeful lamenting that they grow up so quickly — one of the sweetest things about having your children graduate from high school is experiencing that rush of smug relief when you pass a store in early September and see the chaotic crowd of school supply shoppers. Like some sort of twisted ’Nam flashback — but without the helicopters — you suddenly remember the rush of the crowd, the lunging hands, the smell of the new coloured pencils and erasers, and the unprintable exclamations of frustrated parents as they realize that there’s a separate list for each class.

You know there’s a problem when you see a kid, on the verge of tears, yelling at her exasperated mother, “But it can’t be a pink binder — the teacher says it has to be fuchsia!”

Ask any parent in the checkout line and they’ll invariably blame teachers for making things painfully complicated by demanding so many specific items, many of which are next to impossible to obtain after the first wave of shoppers have swept through the stores on their frantic scavenger hunt.

Colour-coded binders may look good in the classroom, but they are totally unnecessary. Back in the good old days — not that long ago — kids chose their own binders and nobody seemed to care about the colour or design. Instead of relying on a strict system of colour-coordination, they had a foolproof method of telling which binder was for what class — they wrote MATH or PHYSICS on the front. It really was that simple, and though many of today’s teachers might not believe it, it worked like a charm.