by Miller Bowe

Welcome back to the wonderful world of secondary education, ladies and gentlemen. No doubt, you’ve spent your last week of summer gathering the school supplies you’ll need for another wonderful year at Godwin High School.

Your backpack is full of the essentials- pencils, notebooks, calculators- but today, these necessities alone are not enough to really wring every delicious drop of education from Godwin’s rag of knowledge.

For instance: while an ordinary wooden pencil may be adequate for note-takery, why bother with the mind-numbing simplicity of a stick full of graphite when you could enter the 21st century with a MECHANICAL PENCIL: a plastic stick full of graphite!

If you’re the sort of person who buys lunch every day, you may want to carry canned goods in your bag, in case the cafeteria’s offerings aren’t to your taste. Don’t feel like eating dubious chicken or a dry taco? Crack open a can of baked beans!

No backpack is truly complete without a spyglass. Stuck in the back of the class and can’t see the board? Don’t bother with an optometrist- pull out a handheld telescope! It’ll also help when the school is besieged by pirates.

It is important to be prepared for anything that may arise. This is why I suggest carrying a prosthetic arm in your backpack with you, in case your English class goes terribly, terribly wrong.

Another essential left out of oh-so-many school bags today is glitter. What essay couldn’t be improved with a smattering of it between the body paragraphs and the conclusion?

A well-stocked backpack can be your best friend in high school, especially if you aren’t good at talking to people and dress real funny. Now, of course, if you really want to be thorough, you should also add a scuba tank, a power drill, and an oscilloscope, among other things, but just these few items will go quite a long way.