Perfect attendance award

God, I am so not a germophobe. I have 7 cats and you should see my house. It is to LAUGH. I just don’t want kids blowing snot everywhere. That’s basic sanitation, asshole, not Howard Hughes-esque nuttery.

You still haven’t answered my questions about the comparability of your tools and mine. I’ll take that as a concession that your comparison was invalid. Thanks.

It happens to be a good fucking idea. I know your probably put all your boogers behind your left ear or something, but considering that kids are a major vector for influenza and other communicable diseases, tissues just make sense. Please offer evidence to counter my claim, otherwise you are just trolling.

Wow. You are a fucking nut. Or drunk. Or just a complete moron. But I don’t want to take anything away from you. Maybe you’re all three at once.

Yeah, my making and the CDC’s. It’s a conspiracy of government flaks to prevent people from getting sick. We are so out of line. And we’re so desperate for your sympathy that you withholding it is making us cry into our widdle pillows. Then blow our noses on state subsidized tissues.

Here’s another vote. I live in Silicon Valley, and work in the computer biz. When I left my last job (after finding another one which was simple) the only impact was that my compute was cut in half. I left because the project I was on was being mismanaged, not because of cellphones.

Some people are in demand.

You never were very popular in school, were you? You were always the kid with snot on his arm, right? Forgive us if the teachers here (and the students and the parents) would like to be able to teach without the constant interruption of 30 kids trying to snork snot back up their noses.

You’re exaggerating. And that means you lose. 30 kids? That’s the whole class. They all have a cold at the same time? Bullshit.

That just proves to me that you teachers are fucked in the head.

Actually, that’s about 75% of my 3rd period class. And you’ve never been in a classroom during cold season? Or for that matter on a cold day, when just the temperature makes everybody’s noses run?

You’re flunking your classes right now, aren’t you?

There are 220 students in the 7th grade. I have about half of them. What percentage of them have snot in their noses at any given time? A lot. Where would everyone in the universe but you prefer that snot to be? In a tissue in the garbage.

Your position here is untenable. Give it up.

Loses what, exactly? In case you haven’t noticed it, there’s not exactly a debate going on here. What there is, is a bunch of posters goading you to say something even dumber. And that’s a game we can’t possibly lose, because there seems to be no upper limit on how stupid you can make yourself appear.

No, you give it up. I went to school and I know what’s it’s like. The entire class doesn’t have colds, and the entire class doesn’t go through cases of tissue. Unless something has happened to the human immunity system in the past few years, and I don’t think so.

It’s you, your germ-phobia, your attention-starved kids, their apathetic, advantage-taking parents, your school administration that you allow to run rough-shod over you.

But mainly it’s you. You could simply stop buying tissue, and let the chips fall. But, you get caught up in the germ-thing, the compassion thing, the CDC.

Forget it. I refuse to have sympathy for you. It’s your own fault.

“The compassion thing?”

Yeah, you’re a real sucker, Rubystreak, what with having all that compassion. For children. What a rube!

And can I just say how deeply I appreciate, “I went to school!” as an attempt to establish one’s credibility in an argument against no fewer than three professional teachers? That’s classic, man. We’re talking, “My post is my cite,” caliber stuff, right there.

No u :rolleyes:

Um, nope, no you apparently don’t. Or you’re lying just to shore up your contrarian argument, one or the other. If you’re going to sit there and tell me that kids don’t produce copious snot, and in the absence of tissue are willing to spray it everywhere, you’re not spending a lot of time around kids.

I think part of my vehemence here comes not from germophobia but from having a massive sinus infection for the last 2 weeks, and also gave it to my husband. This happens at least 2-3 times a year and it fucking sucks boulders through a cocktail straw. I hate being sick, so I give out a lot of tissue. Consider it enlightened self-interest if compassion gets your hackles up, Zambini old bean.

You realize that the entire class is over 100 people, right? And people who aren’t sick sometimes sneeze or need to blow their noses, right? Or wipe their glasses or whatever. Other places besides schools provide tissue for public consumption. This isn’t a hard concept to grasp, why they do this.

They run roughshod over me by blowing their noses? I’m germophobic because I want them to use tissue? Truly your have a dizzying intellect.

God, I hate it when people get caught up in the compassion thing! And I don’t buy tissue. The taxpayers of NYS do, and I love them for it. The office bitch doesn’t like to get off her ass and get it for me out of the supply closet; fortunately, the guidance secretary has a key too. Ha.

I don’t want your sympathy. I don’t care what you say or think, remember? I’m just arguing with you out of sheer boredom, and because it’s fucking hilarious. As for fault, yeah. What? What the hell are you on about?

Maybe it’s time to deploy the DNFTT defense for this ridiculous argument. It’s really going nowhere.

Brilliant!

Clearly, Rubystreak, your major flaws are an understanding of one of the vectors of disease, having feeling for other humans, and believing in endeavors to improve public health. How dare you, woman? HE WENT TO SCHOOL!

I’m not guessing. It’s a big, fucking “yes”.

Uh oh, I’m siding with you again. :rolleyes:

Actually, when my competitor went down, there was a feeding frenzy for talent from them. Lots of highly trained, motivated people looking for jobs, many of them with a stuffed rolodex. There was also a feeding frenzy for the clients of that firm.

I’ve no doubt that things could turn sour and I’m working in delivering pizzas one day. But right now, I’ve hedged my bets AND my skills are in demand. So, if next week my employer were to say, “D_Odds, we’re cutting costs. From now on, use Motel 6 when you are on the road,” I will be on the phone , probably along with hundreds of my colleagues, putting my network to use. Of course, unlike you, I haven’t been a gaping asshole to everyone I’ve encountered, so they will take my calls. Maybe that is why you think it is hard, because no one wants to talk to you?

Obviously, you’re unable to resist my gigantic, throbing post count. It’s okay. I get that a lot.

Actually, I think you are on to something. Think of how much money we could save by cutting out the cost of toilet paper as well! :rolleyes:

This is the stupidest discussion I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ll just throw in the mix here, that as a civil/environmental engineer here in central Connecticut, there are literally hundreds of consulting firms, municipalities, and public agencies for which my skillset is in demand, all within commuting radius of my house.

I decided to make a job change recently, primarily because I felt that I was stagnating a bit at my old job. I put out exactly three resumes. All promptly led to interviews and job offers. As I left my previous firm, my former boss told me to give him a call if the new job I picked didn’t work out. None of these jobs would have required my family to move, either.

Finally, Zambini57, the reason that mechanics traditionally supply their own tools is simply because many employers believe that employer-supplied tools will either get stolen or will get abused and broken.

But it’s hilarious to follow :smiley:

Zambini, get your head out of your ass. Your shit really doesn’t smell that good.

How did this turn into a dispute about tissues? Rubystreak is 100% correct.

I work in a Title 1 school, and the list of supplies I buy for my class is staggering. No, I don’t ask my kids for much, because they don’t have much. My school won’t make copies for us, so I supply my own paper and use the union copier, or just go to Staples like everyone else.
I regularly buy tissues, pencils, crayons, sharpeners, and notebooks for my kids. Am I a “sucker”? No, just a regular teacher. I buy hand sanitizer because there’s no soap in the children’s bathrooms (none in the teacher’s bathrooms, either).
There’s no magic closet in my school that holds supplies - we’re expected to buy our own backing paper and border for mandatory bulletin boards - I have to change 8 of them every month. Drawing and writing paper? Yup, out of my pocket, too.

I receive a stipend of $260 each year. I spent that much in August alone. Right now I’m out over $900. I just sent in a check for $250 for my kids to go to a puppet show. No, they haven’t paid me yet, but I’m hoping a few will.

<whew> sorry for the rant, but the threadsh*tter really set me off.

Yeah, but the law can’t force individual teachers to buy the supplies out of pocket. I have a few friends who are teachers and most of them spend several hundred a year out of pocket on supplies. My understanding is this basically boils down to a convenience issue for them, they all usually tend to say that over the year’s they’ve learned things just work better sometimes if you just buckle down and provide pencils and et cetera out of pocket versus waiting for the school to take care of it.

That being said, I think it’s ridiculous that people expect this of teachers or think that teachers should do this with no complaints. It’s very nice that many teachers buy supplies for their class rooms out of pocket, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.

I’m reminded of a history teacher I had in High School. You had to drop a nickel in a jar if you wanted to borrow a pencil (note this is probably more expensive than pencils are even today if I had to guess, definitely way more back when I was in High School!), and you couldn’t get it back unless you remembered to return your pencil at the end of class. He was actually really kinda hilariously-anal about making sure he got any of his supplies back that students used.

“Isn’t required” is also sort of a myth. You aren’t required to buy supplies, but you are required to be an effective teacher, and it’s really difficult to do that without shelling out some extra dough.

For one thing, efficiency matters. The amount of stuff you could be doing to be a better teacher is endless: you could always grade essays more carefully (write more comments, give more examples), call more parents, write more versions of the quizzes to prevent cheating, read more materials that might be useful . . . you are never done, but there is a cap on how much you actually can do. Therefore, anything that makes you less efficient carries the opportunity cost of doing those things that make you an effective teacher: Clipboards, hanging files, legal pads, file boxes or filing cabinets, etc, aren’t required to do the job, but they free up time to be better at the job.

Other things teachers buy themselves help more directly with instruction: everything from whiteboards to overhead pens to construction paper. This is where all the copying comes in: IME the best teachers make lots of copies because those are the ones going beyond “read the book and answer the questions”: they are the ones making activities and excercises that address the needs of their specfic kids, bringing in newspaper articles that are relevant to what the class is discussing, etc.

Lastly, teachers spend money to create a feel in their room. Having pencils and pens and tissue and not being a complete hardass about them makes your room feel more inviting, makes the kids more open and ready to learn. Having posters on your walls makes the room energetic and passionate about the subject. Knowing that if they can’t afford to go on the field trip, they won’t get left behind makes kids feel comfortable.

You can do your job with what they give you, but IME people who try have cold, hard rooms, boring and repetitive classes, and never do more than the bare minimum. While those people may hang on to a job in a weak school, in a strong school they will be run off—you can’t really fire a teacher, many places, but you can make their life hell until they go. So while you aren’t really required to buy stuff to be a teacher, you are required to be a good teacher, and that takes stuff!