My favorite part of the day is early morning sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of fresh brewed coffee and the morning paper.

I love the quiet of the morning and I immerse myself in reading the national and local news. I’m a bit of a reading junkie, and as well as the news I read the editorials, letters to the editor and even the obituaries.

My guilty pleasure part of the newspaper is the comic section. I have been reading the comics since I was a little girl and it feels like I’m having coffee with old friends when I read Mark Trail, Blondie, Nancy and Peanuts.

I don’t find the comics as ha, ha funny, but they are sometimes quite amusing and often ironic and on occasion nostalgic. That was the case with Nancy recently when Aunt Fritzi asked Nancy why she and Sluggo were late coming home from school.

The forever kids responded that they had stayed late to help the teacher.

“Oh, you cleaned the erasers?” Aunt Fritzi asked.

That question brought a puzzled look from Nancy and Sluggo. So, Aunt Fritzi said, “You cleaned the white board and sorted the dry erase pens, huh?” and the two youngsters nodded yes.

The mention of cleaning erasers took me right back to elementary school and choking on chalk dust from banging the erasers together. I could almost smell the chalk as I thought about it.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain. Back in the day when chalkboards, then called blackboards because they were in fact black, were heavily written on with chalk and the erasers became coated in chalk dust from all the erasing and had to be cleaned at the end of the day. The cleaning method was to take them outside and bang them together.

As kids we begged for eraser duty and felt privileged when chosen by the teacher. Then the lucky kid or kids got to go outside no matter what the weather and bang the erasers, choke on the chalk dust and get absolutely covered in it. Oh, those were happy days.

It wasn’t until I became a teenager and wanted no part of chalk dust in my teased hair or on my angora sweaters that I realized what a con the teachers had going.

Not only could they get the kids to do their dirty work, the kids fought for the opportunity and thought they were hot stuff when they got picked for the job.

Yet, it seems kind of sad to think that eraser duty may be a thing of the past. I haven’t been in a classroom in many years so I don’t really know what goes on, but when I questioned my grandkids about eraser duty it got me looks like I have two heads.

I asked my son if he remembers eraser duty and his eyes lit right up. “I used to love doing that. We’d bang them against the school and leave chalk marks in different patterns all over the brick. Sometimes, we banged them against each other.”

It does make me wonder how many other things the kids are missing out on in the way of duties that made you feel like king or queen of the roost. Do the teachers still pick a student to take the attendance slips to the office? Going to the office on important business rather than being called there for punishment was a big status deal. I experienced both.

How about hall monitors? I was a seriously good hall monitor until I got caught skipping class and lost that little perk.

I know things have changed one heck of a lot. Some things are for the better I’m sure, but some things I have to question. No doubt it’s a good thing that a kid can’t be made to stand in front of the class with gum stuck on their nose because they got caught chewing it in their Freshman English class. That was not a good experience. But the way I see it, to not be able to bang some erasers together in a cloud of chalk dust is missing out on what was one of the good experiences of being in school.