All right, now that everyone is officially swamped in schoolwork and other activities, tell me how much you would give to be a kid again.

Yeah, it’s cliche, but honestly, as I sit at a desk, pouring over notes on the lives of people who are long dead and not even related to me, I can’t help but space off and wish I was someplace else.

Someplace like elementary school.

There are people who can knock high school and junior high as horrible times in their lives and I can distinctly remember being stressed-out my fair share in those hormone-infested years, but when it comes to elementary school, it gets easy to find a common denominator of good memories.

I mean, what did anyone do all day that wasn’t fun?

Classes were generally taught by gigantic (remember your own size) ladies, usually with especially curly hair and glasses.

They were either fun to be around or they picked their noses and stuck the boogers behind their ear for a snack later on (that may have been a rumor).

Whether they were good witches or bad witches, though, didn’t really make much difference in the education you received.

It’s not like today, when a psychotic instructor gets up in front of a class of 150 and says only one of you will walk away with an “A.”

No, a “mean” teacher was simply more apt to send you to the principal’s office for the minor infractions of good behavior, like eating paste or belching in the face of Becky, the girl who sat next to you.

Yet, even the worst day from elementary school pales in comparison to some of the trials that hit in college.

Nowadays, it feels like you need to schedule in time to take breaths, much less worry about the 15-page paper due at 8 a.m. tomorrow.

A little over a decade ago, most of us simply had to throw down our Transformer or My-Little-Pony backpacks after school and schedule in the next round of “cops and robbers” or “war” for that afternoon.

Homework was something that only “big kids” did, and I remember being naively envious of that privilege.

Until the day came that homework was finally assigned, though, figuring out how to feed the dog the rest of your mashed potatoes without your parents noticing was the hardest your brain had to work past 5 p.m.

The more I think about it, the more I miss the almost-utopia of being five to 10 years old, and the more I put off doing anything for my classes tomorrow. It just sickens me that, back then, none of us had any idea how good things really were.

It’s going to be at least 60 more years before any of us can have so little to do with our time, and by then, our bodies probably won’t be able to take rolling down the hill in the field next door.

I also doubt there will ever be a time when I can wake up at six in the morning without an alarm for the sole purpose of eating Apple Jacks and watching Pac-Man or Thundarr the Barbarian.

But that’s probably the way it should be. If great moments lasted forever, there wouldn’t be anything left to truly treasure in life.

Childhood is a magic that doesn’t last, but that fact alone makes us remember it as all the more magical.

The memories are probably just the Man Upstairs’ way of asking a few of us to recall the wonder of our early years, and inspire it in the life of someone else.

Someone who will, one day, be getting ready to belch and who will swear the teacher just picked her nose.

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Ryan Fischer is a columnist for The Baylor Lariat at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.