As you leave for the first day of school, you check your brand new backpack and see all of your supplies including pencil pouches, mechanical pencils, black pens, binders, and folders. The average middle school student always loses pencils, no matter how hard they try. The average cost to make a pencil is 10 cents. That means that if each student loses four or five pencils a week and there are roughly 500 students, that’s $250 a week in pencils. That is 9,000 dollars in lost pencils per year. Teachers have a tendency to be asked for a pencil by students.
“I order 240 dozen pencils (2800 pencils) for each school year” responded middle school secretary, Mrs. Baker. Those pencils are distributed to teachers all across the whole middle school.
“I get asked about 40 times a week for pencils from all my classes,” says Ms. Ging, sixth grade teacher. For teachers, pencils are given by the school, but students ask for a pencil and take it for the rest of the day. This results in teachers losing pencils very quickly.
Scratch paper is the most common way to display your work. Most students have about four and a half pieces of homework in a week. Multiple students agree that math is the hardest subject for homework. It has the most homework and it’s hardest to learn. Middle schoolers despise the idea of showing work, but teachers love it to show if students are cheating. On average, students tend to use three pieces of scratch paper in a week. If each student uses that much by the end of the school year, one student will have used 576 pieces of paper. That means that students use one ream from a tree, that is six percent of a tree.
Knock knock, who’s there? A broken pencil. A broken pencil who? Never mind, It’s pointless.