Tuesday marks the day when most students in Minnesota, from elementary to college age, return to school. Some schools have already started, of course, although the public districts have to receive permission to start before Labor Day. Private schools and colleges are not subject to this rule, and many students have already started their long walks and rides to school.

For our family this means that our daughter will be starting tenth grade, our son will be entering sixth grade, and I’ll be starting…twenty-first grade? I think? It gets a little murky after the bachelor’s degree. There were a few years when we had moved away from the state where I had been attending graduate school, and I still registered for dissertation credit in the hope of finishing my Ph.D. It didn’t happen, although I worked really hard on it until I realized that I’d rather stay home with my daughter than finish my dissertation and try to find a job as an adjunct or associate professor.

It feels strange to be starting school again, and it’s not just the fact that I am old enough to be a mother to most of the students I see on campus. (It will take me awhile to get over the mortifying incident of a young student trying to help what he thought was a confused old lady in the parking garage.)

There is a sense of déjà vu, of course. I’ve been through the back-to-school routine many times now, as a participant and a parent and even a professor. I also won’t deny that it’s exciting to step back into a college bookstore and see the piles of books for classes I’ll never take: biology, psychology, finance, Greek. There’s a sense of regret for that, of course. I really should have tried to find a degree program outside of liberal arts as an undergrad. I probably wouldn’t be starting a new graduate program at the age of (cough,cough) if I had majored in electrical engineering or accounting. (Who knows? Maybe I would have. I still can’t see myself as having been interested in those fields for a career.)

And of course it is exciting to pick up the books I need. Aside from the lovely anticipation of seeing the piles of fascinating books on the shelves, there is the question of whether I want to splurge on new books or be a careful steward of our resources and settle for used ones. Do I want to have to ignore other students’ highlighting and margin notes as I read through the assigned material? Wouldn’t it be lovely to be the first person to peek between the covers of a new text, the pages still slightly sticking to each other and the scent of fresh ink and paper rising as one flips through the leaves of the book? (I opted for used when available.)

But there is much that is different. Books are available in electronic format as well as paper. Each course and professor has a website. Registration—that formerly hours-long process of standing in line and moving from window to window—has been reduced to a few keystrokes (Heaven be praised!), as has been paying the bill. No more standing in line and writing out that check with a gulp and a hope that the paycheck or the loan or the scholarship money or the contribution from the parents has arrived in the bank account.

There are personal computers and software packages along with books and notebooks, tablet styluses (styli?) next to pens, calculators that can do everything but laundry. Actually, there are probably ways for college students to do laundry without actually schlepping their dirty clothes down into the dank, ill-lit room in the basement of the dorm. (The laundry room in one of my dorm halls always seemed to me to be the perfect setting for a horror movie. I don’t know if anything bad ever happened there, but it was really creepy.) When I was an undergrad, the biggest new technology was a CD player. Now, practically every student I see is using a cellphone or has one peeking out of a pocket, and these phones have more computing power than I could have imagined as an 18-year-old.

Back to school. This time, I hope, with a greater sense of what I want to do with the years remaining to me, and with a greater goal in mind than getting a job that pays well and that I can enjoy. Back to school with more obligations, as well: a husband and two children, a newly-redefined job with more hours and responsibilities. Yet back to school with the same hopes of exploring new ideas, making new friends, achieving new goals, finding meaning and purpose. I can hardly wait.