soul shakedown

Today I went to the dollar store to restock the Prize Box for all the Jedi Rewards I will be needing for the new incentive program (presuming the Jedis can manage to stop annoying the crap out of me long enough for me to award them enough points.)

Buying prizes is something I love doing, for lots of reasons. Partly because it really doesn't take much to make a kid happy, and because who in their right mind doesn't love a brand new box of crayons (even if they are the cheap waxy dollar store kind)? Also I like to think that the items I choose are infinitesimally small notches into the giant climbing wall of social justice and equality -- this jumprope shall combat childhood obesity! These bubbles shall spread joy and wonder among children who may or may not have enough of it in their lives! This stencil shall make its mark in the service of art where art has been forsaken!

Also, I like to mentally multiply my excitement by like 25 to equal that of a 10-year-old confronted with a treasure box full of these riches.

Clearly, kids don't NEED prizes in order to learn, and I don't NEED them in order to teach. But they are kind of fun... I liken this expenditure to, say, buying doughnuts for your cubicle-mates, or springing for coffees one morning, just to be sociable. It's a personal contribution to your place of work in order to make it a more genial place for you to be in eight or more hours a day.

But when I dropped my thirty six bucks on my plastic made-in-China loot in the name of cheap material pleasures, it made me think about other stuff that I regularly shell out my hard-earned shekels for.

I wonder if the government that oversees public education knows just how much they receive in charitable contributions from teachers... I don't know of any teacher in the school who doesn't spend hundreds of dollars on their kids and their classroom every year. Compound that over years of service, and per teacher, per school - it adds up.

Many things we buy as teachers could never be considered budgetary necessities - pizza parties, prizes, snacks for celebrations, gifts for holidays, decorations for the classroom, "sponsoring" kids' field trips whose parents can't scrape up the cash (like D--, who almost couldn't come on the $9 bowling trip because her little brother needed asthma medication that week)... I'm pretty sure none of these things are tax deductible. But the thing is, if we don't buy those things for our kids? Then the kids just don't get to have them. And as a teacher it's very hard to see your kids not getting the things you feel they deserve and should be entitled to.

But it's not all frivolity that we reach into our pockets for. If you were wondering if budget cuts are real and whether or not they affect teachers' and students' daily lives, they are and they do.

Last year, every teacher got a whole box of paper to use for copies, and Mr. P was able to spring for printer ink. My AP Candy, who is quite gifted at getting us things we need, ordered me a brand new rug (a requisite for the kids to sit on as part of the TC Workshop model) when she noticed that mine was dirty.

This year I asked Candy, now that I had 29 kids and needed 29 spots on my rug instead of 20, if there was any chance of getting a new one. She said, no, not really, but ask around...I did, but wound up anyway with a third of my kids sitting on dollar store bath mats for the mini-lessons.
This year, Mr. P did the best he could by giving us two reams of paper each, and the ink request was negatory.

So what are the choices? Use the printer less? Stop making copies two months in? Or spread the burden to kids and their families by asking them to bring in reams of paper, which we do, along with tissues and ziploc bags and scissors and calculators and crayons... or we spring for it ourselves.

In recognition that teachers have a lot of unique supplies they need, they get "Teacher's Choice" money every year ( at least, we have been and hope to continue doing so - last year $250, this year $150). And we appreciate the sentiment, we really do. But to me at least, it kind of feels like spitting in the ocean.

So when the bigwigs in their offices make their budget cuts to public education, I wonder if they realize: schools don't all of a sudden start needing less money to make them go. It's just that the people in and involved with the schools, who care about schools, start footing more of the bill.