When you're a teacher, that often means more than new shoes, a lunch box, and a sweater. It means pimping out your classroom to blow students away on the first day of school. When I say "pimping," I'm not exaggerating. I believe that there is a significant amount of bandwidth on Pinterest devoted to storing the images of classroom ideas. (Try it, I dare you.)
Now granted, I teach high school, so the decor is very different from the awesome classrooms that are often created in an elementary school setting. If I could get away with it, don't think that my own classroom wouldn't be done up with owls, beanbag chair reading centers, and cubbies. However, being a high school teacher, I'd probably get shanked.
Regardless, I still decorate, organize, and plan for the school year, even though many teacher supply stores cater to the younger grades. This means supplies, bulletin board stuff, tape, pens, sharpies, etc. Most schools, well at least my school, don't have a kick ass craft room where you can go pick out butcher paper, grab some Expo markers, and maybe pick up a simple bulletin board border. In fact, at the school I just left, there was one cabinet in the teacher work room that held our supplies. It usually consisted of rubber bands, brown Expo markers, paper clips, and these weird behavior postcards that you could fill out and send to parents. I'm not sure those moved in the seven years I was there.
This means that I frequent the teacher store, Michaels, and office supply stores to spend my own money on supplies for my classroom.
With August comes the promise of "Teacher Appreciation Day" at some of the bigger chain office supply stores. For the past ten years, I have done my research on dates and times, carefully marked my calendar, and often showed up at the stores before the doors open, usually in a line of other teachers, anxiously clutching their faculty/staff ID, crossing their fingers that they won't run out of good stuff before it's their turn. The doors open, and it's like a designer sample sale, except for much poorer people who have not had an income for two months.
The first year I went to one of these events was 2004. I went with my mentor teacher in Orlando, and it was like opening day at a theme park. Every teacher received a big cardboard box, breakfast, raffle tickets, the works. Inside that box was a label maker, a hand-crank laminator, packages of folders, boxes of pens, pencils, sticky notes, expo markers, sharpies. It was like winning a teacher's lottery. Talk about feeling appreciated!!
Fast forward to 2013. Thomas is now a teacher, and today's date has been on the calendar for weeks. We got up early, ensconced the kids with a movie, threatened to kill them if they opened the door or answered the phone, and trotted off to Staples, hand-in-hand, excited about the goodies that we might find through the doors.
We walk in, and it seems like business as usual. We wander around the store for a few minutes, looking for the fanfare, and there was not a streamer, balloon, or banner in sight. We ask an associate about the teacher event, and he says, "You might want to check at the customer service desk." Back up to the front, we approach the desk that is covered in brown cardboard boxes. I get a little excited. This is it...this is what I've been waiting for! Thomas and I, school ID's in hand, anxious smiles on our faces, approach the girl at the counter. She brightly smiles and says, "Hi, fill this in for a drawing for a free calendar, and here's your gift." She handed us this:
This is what was in it:
I'm not kidding. This was the ONLY thing that was in it. A useless calendar that no teacher would ever be able to use to actually do any planning in, and it was copied in their copy center with a blue paper back page.
Really?
Maybe there was something in the back of the store. We wandered around, thinking that the breakfast was in the back. No breakfast. We looked at some of the "great deals" that were touted on the website, only to wind up in a discussion about whether or not we should get the one-subject spiral notebooks that both Thomas and I use in our classrooms for journals at Staples, where they were .50 a piece (times 150-ish students) or go to Wal-Mart where they're less per piece. You people KNOW how much I hate Wal-Mart.
We left, purchasing only a pack of golf pencils (Thomas gives them to students who neglect to bring a writing utensil to class....AFTER he asked me if he was being a dick for giving them crappy pencils. To which I responded, "Not when these golf pencils are $8 a box! They're lucky you give them anything"), and five packages of notebook paper for the house.
I left sad, and a little deflated. I know, everyone likes free stuff, and I should be grateful for what I received, but I think this was more than that. I love what I do, and I don't mind spending my money for stuff for my job. I just felt like a big chain like Staples, that clearly makes LOTS of money off of teachers, could maybe help us out, throw us a bone, give us an incentive to shop there rather than other stores. It just reminded me that teachers today spend more time apologizing for things that are out of their control (testing, lack of desk, lack of materials, lack of funding for continuing education, blah, blah, blah) rather than what they want to be doing--working with kids.
You know what, I don't care what Staples thinks, or what some dude on Capitol Hill who has never taught a day in his life thinks. I care about being able to be a part of kids lives, and to hopefully make an impact on some of them, the way some of my own teachers did to me. With or without the big pretty pack of Sharpies.
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