Just in case you hadn't noticed, Christmas has arrived at some stores around town. Christmas trees and other decorative items can be found on the shelves even though it's only August for God sake. It really annoys me that this stuff is out in the stores when the kids haven't even gone back to school yet.
Speaking of school, I swear I saw some stores advertising back-to-school items before the schools were even out for summer break. It is getting ridiculous. Pretty soon we will see stores advertising stuff a full year ahead of themselves. Then they can charge more as they will be advertising 2017 prices in 2016. It drives me crazy. Sometimes I feel like screaming when I see a Christmas tree on display at the beginning of August.
Anyway, what I wanted to get at was school supplies. I went with my wife the other day to get supplies for my nine-year-old son and, after taking out a second mortgage, we got most of the items on the list.
It seems to me that each year the lists get more extravagant and quite honestly some of the items can seem a bit silly. For instance my son's Grade 4 supply list indicates that he requires 40 pencils. That is not a typo. Not 4 but 40. If you take into consideration that he is off for nine weeks during the summer, two weeks at Christmas and a week or two for spring break, that means - even if you don't count pro-D days -he is in school for about 40 weeks per year. If my own Grade 4 math is correct that would mean one pencil per week of school. That is simply insane. He will get five pencils and if he uses them up he will get one at a time.
I'm not sure what other parent's expectations are, but I require my son to look after his pencils and if he ever went through 15 pencils let alone 40 in a school year his name would immediately be taken out of my will, because if he is going to go through pencils like some rabid beaver at a timber convention then he simply cannot be trusted to look after the $28.50 I had set aside for him in my will.
I think I had two pencils for a whole year when I was in elementary school and if I went through them before the end of the year not only did I get the Do You Think Money Grows On Trees speech, then my parents would look for hand-me-down pencils from my older brother. If there weren't any I would have to buy them out of my own money. If I had no money I would have to take out a loan from my parents. I think I still owe them for two erasers, a double-lined copy book and 11 pencils. As students we would unscrew the blade from the pencil sharpener, scrape the paint off the end of our pencils and use a pen to write our name on the bare wood, that way if anyone stole it we would know.
Then I got to wondering if there were any other silly things on school supply lists and spent a few minutes scouring the Internet.
I did manage to find some items that may top my sons required 40 pencils. One list required 25 HB pencils with erasers, as well as five white erasers. So that would be 30 erasers in all. And why do the five erasers have to be white. Since when does anyone give a damn what colour the erasers are as long as they erase.
Here are some of the other required school supplies I found for elementary students:
Two boxes of tissue and two bottles of hand sanitizer
1 - 125 count Kleenex facial issue (not generic tissue but specifically Kleenex. What happens if a kid brings in a box of PC brand nose tissue with 100 sheets. Will he be suspended until he brings in the specific 125 count Kleenex facial tissue. My parents would have laughed themselves silly at this requirement and sent me to school with a roll of toilet paper. If it is good enough to use at home it is certainly good enough to use at school.)
24 No.2 yellow pencils and a single AA battery. (It didn't say what the AA battery was for - but the yellow pencils and the white erasers earlier seem to suggest no form of individuality is allowed. What if Johnny brings a Transformers pencil? Oh my god. Some other kid might be offended because he can't afford a Transformers pencil and we simply can't have that.)
1 pack of dry erase markers (are they now requiring the kids to buy the teacher's supplies?)
1 package of baby wipes (aren't babies too young to be in school?)
1 box of Ziploc bags. Girls: gallon size, boys: sandwich size (What the... This makes absolutely no sense.)
15 glue sticks (that's enough to glue every piece of furniture in my house to the ceiling)
Clorox wipes (girls), baby wipes (boys) (Absolute discrimination I tell you)
Next time you get a school supplies list and think some of the items are a bit weird consider this comment left on a school supplies forum: "I would say the strangest on our list by far was a tube of tennis balls. I asked around why and apparently they cut them and use them at the bottom of the chairs to make it quiet in the classroom when the kids move around."
