Our kids go to a once a week charter school. They finished up this past week, so I get the joy of going through their backpacks to fish out broken plastic spoons (ugh--when did he even use that????), unopened fruit snacks, multiple office supplies that may possibly not belong to us.... My touchpoint, every year, are those darn composition notebooks. They're never used. Not to such a degree that they're necessary. Out of six composition notebooks this year, only one got used more than halfway. The other five? Two weren't used at all, one had two lines used, and the other two had no more than four pages used. Combine that waste with the pencils, and we've got a serious tree destruction habit.
I want so bad to quit this habit. I'm a paper and pencil kinda gal. I'll look up directions from Google maps and then take out an index card to write the directions down. I'm fine with that. I use a paper grocery list. But the amount of compostion notebook waste is mind boggling. Teachers request these things. I put my children's names on these things. And these things don't get used in the classroom. Isn't it about time we asked more of ourselves? Why do class supply lists come out before class even begins? Teachers have some notion in the summer of what they want, and then change their minds when they're actually in the nitty gritty of it all. Totally understandable, I don't have a year's worth of stuff figured out at a time.
And I can hear the arguments from teachers already. If we don't ask before school, we don't get it. It's such a battle to get those supplies from kids, we overask so we can share. I don't buy either of these. I understand them, I know them to be true, but I don't see them as blockades to doing things better. We are so used to being a gluttonous society, just go out and get new. Replace that broken thing. Throw out that old thing. Get more, do less. Oh how it all hurts.....
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