MyThreeDaughters

They were out of the infamous No. 2 pencils at Walgreens on Sunday. The whole row, whole stack, whole display case…gone.
Must be the parents of kids from my first-grader’s class, I thought.
See, each kid in her class was supposed to show up with four packages of 20 or 24 No. 2 pencils. You know how many pencils that is, for the class, for the year? Eighteen kids in the class, times 80 pencils each, that’s 1,440 pencils.
What’re they going to do, take every standardized test on the planet, 50 times? How many standardized test grid circles can you color in with 1,440 pencils?
Aren’t they exceeding government standards for lead exposure?
My wife was at Wal-Mart, where they were also sold out of No. 2 pencils (Shouldn’t that be a national headline: “Wal-Mart Fails to Anticipate School Supply Crush.”) My wife told a clerk how many pencils she was supposed to provide for the school supplies list.
“Are you a teacher?” the clerk asked.
(No, I don’t have a copy machine, and I’m going to duplicate “War and Peace” in pencil.)
Now, what I think is that the public schools long ago shifted this school supply burden to the teachers, and the teachers shifted it to the kids. But that’s just me. And I’m obviously crazy, because I personally haven’t used the sum total of 80 pencils in my entire life.
Oh yeah, and we’re supposed to bring them sharpened. So I guess we need an electric pencil sharpener, because as my wife points out:
Can you see us sharpening 80 pencils with one of those little plastic pencil sharpeners?