IANA Parent, but I quiz my sister, who has two kids of middle school age, on this every year. We, too, grew up in the era of: you’ll need a few pencils, notebooks and paper… and a box of tissues. I don’t recall my mother ever sending us in with hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise, or boxes of tissues for that matter.
Last year, for grades 7 and 5, my sister was required to provide cassette tapes and one VCR tape. Never saw/heard what was taped, don’t know if she ever got those back with her kids’ recorded on them.
That’s the most unusual thing I can think of, offhand. Generally, I believe she spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 per kid for supplies.
What’s bugging me is that when I was in school, calculators of any kind were FORBIDDEN until eighth grade or so, and the then-ultra-new graphing calculators were forbidden at any grade, and highly discouraged in college.
I took a sales folder to work once. Never again. If someone buys from your kid, you have to buy from theirs and you wind up with all kinds of overpriced crap.
I told my daughter that I was just going to pay her “Fair Share” requirements for chorus and swim team and not buy anything. Except maybe a couple of the chorus pies - them’s good pies.
Wow, I think my total “required” items to buy while in school was…nothing. I seriously don’t remember in either elementary or HS the teacher making me or my parent buy supplies, I didn’t even have to get a graphing calculator for AP calc, because the school had about a dozen of thgem for the class. I mean, I did need to buy a couple of notebooks, some pens and pencils, maybe a sharpener, that’s it. The school/classroom always had fancy things like rulers, scissors, poster-board, etc…I guess that with declining school budgets, though, these kinds of things are harder and harder to have supplied by the school.
(Hell, in HS, each room even had their own supply of tissues that the school provided!)
Teacher checking in here. I started teaching 6th grade math a few years back, and when I saw the supply list for the beggining of the year, I was shocked. I crossed off the math workbook, scissors, markers, compass and protractors, and rulers. I asked for one 5 subject notebook…and that’s it. The math total went from about $40 down to $2, or whatever that notebook costs.
Our school also bundles the rest of the supplies (planner and folders) and each student has to buy one. Not a bad idea as it saves the parents a trip to the store and some money.
I don’t like to rock the boat, but if I were required to buy some of the items listed above, I would contact a local school board member or principal and start asking the best question of all…“Why do we need this again?” It’s not neccesarily the money, but sometimes teachers can get out of control with their requirements. I know many teachers who change their list to fit whatever whim they happen to have for that year. Some supplies make sense and are badly needed, but others are simply gimcrack.
Whatever happened to the concept of working an equation or series of equations to come up with a graph on your own? I had teachers throughout school that would send us to the office if they found us in possession of any type of calculator. Are the teachers just too lazy to grade papers or help students do anything?
I didn’t even get a supply list this year. As I’m going to be a junior, I suppose they think that I know what I should get.
I got new mechanical pencils, new pens, new highlighters, 2 spiral notebooks, a new planner, glue sticks, and new messenger bag (I had a perfectly nice backpack, but it’s kind of big.)
I am reusing all my 3-ring notebooks from previous years. For some of them, this will be the fourth year that I’ve used them. (Buying the really nice ones pays off!)
I am not in favor of unnecessary supplies (see my post above). A graphing calculator is technology. Do you still do all your research using the Dewey Decimal System? Many parents were outraged when computers started being used in schools more and more. I knew of a teacher in my highschool that taught typing and refused to switch over to computers as late as 1995! Do you think her students were better off becuase of this?
A graphing calculator is a fantastic tool, and a working knowledge of it gives students the ability to concentrate on math reasoning and application rather than calculation. I am a math teacher, and I still use a calculator if I have a large list of numbers to work with. Does this make me lazy? I think it shows that I am smart enough to use a tool that has been put in my use.
Saying that teachers are too lazy to grade or help students is a cheap shot. Most teachers who teach classes that use graphing calculators have more work to do, because they have to stay on top of the technology involved. Many of these teachers started teaching before graphing calculators were commonly used, so they have had to take training workshops and so on.
I would also wager that the level of mathematics being taught in today’s highschools is far beyond what was being taught 10 years ago. I know it was, because I was in school 10 years ago. I hope technology is used more often in the future of teaching so students will be able to maximize their potentials.
I remember in elementary school, teachers would just give out ‘guidelines,’ no requirements…and the guidelines were your basic stuff. Pencils, paper, glue, etc. In my new school district–I’ll be a senior–there are requirement lists for elementary schools but not for either middle school or the high school.
My mom did go a little overboard on the supplies though. Lots of new folders and notebooks, but curiously not very many pencils or pens. I’ve got 7 folders (one for each class), pencils, two pens, my calculator, my PDA (it’s two years old and I use it to record homework…yes, I know I could just write it down), a looseleaf notebook, a regular notebook, and two highlighters. Oh, and a messenger bag, like Mirror Image egamI rorriM.
In our High School, all you really ever need is a pencil and paper.
In middle school, part of the “required” list was 2 boxes of Kleenex brought to your first hour teacher. Upon opening said teacher’s closet, you would find about 50 unopened boxes of Kleenex. But here’s the thing, the teacher did not set them out for the students. Instead she set out
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toilet paper. The cheap kind from the janitor’s closet.
Are you guys talking about public or private schools? I have never heard before of a public school requiring kids to buy anything. In fact, one school I taught in, which had a fairly high portion of low-income students, we teachers were told that it was illegal to require students to buy anything. The school supplied every single required thing. Even book covers. Although everyone knows you can make a perfectly good one out of a paper bag, the school provided book covers, and we were not allowed to give the kids a homework assignment that required that the book be taken home until we had also provided a cover for said book.
The rule was, and as far as I know still is, that the state and local government is mandated to provide a free public education, and if the pupil has to pay for a required thing, it’s no longer free. If there was a school trip, that had to be free, too.
What would these schools do if the child did not have one or more of these required supplies?
We just discovered (after buying new Jansports of course) that our kids will not be allowed to use backpacks, nor will they have school lockers other than their P.E. locker!
They’re also on an A/B schedule, meaning half of their classes are on one day, and the other half on the following day - which means two entirely separate binders to hold their stuff in because they won’t have lockers to store their other class stuff between classes.
Middle school - I’m not a happy camper. So far, I’ve spent around $250 for two children NOT including the new Jansports now hanging empty on the door knobs of their bedroom.
TeenSthrnAccent had to have one of these also. I didn’t feel it was an unnecessary purchase though. He really did have to learn to use it and used it quite a bit for the graphing and honors level math classes.
:dubious: My math teachers in high school always made the students in their classes prove they could do the work on a test without the calculator first. Then, later, when the graph (or whatever it was you were using the calculator for) was just a beginning step in a long problem, you didn’t have to sit and calculate it all by hand, wasting valuable time in a test situation.
I’m very grateful for the technology that’s available and I see no reason not to use it, especially since the calculator is only as good as the data put into it. You don’t have a clue of what you’re doing, you can’t possibly expect to get an answer you can work with from a calculator. Not laziness on the student’s or the teacher’s part. Just sensibility.
So far, I’ve spent about $200 in school supplies for college, but wherever possible, I bought the best quality I could afford for the non-disposables. I don’t think I’ll have to buy new binders every year.
Part of this was sixty bucks on a nice, wheeled backpack. I’ve got neck problems, and the thought of having to carry about twenty pounds on my back was too painful to think about.
Anticipating several map-intensive courses, I bought good markers and map pencils, as well as a box of 100 crayons. (Yay for crayola.com!) Whatever doesn’t get used will be cheerfully given to Aaron, who will be the right age for coloring and drawing when I graduate.
One piece of advice I got from a college bulletin was not to get much more than what you need to get organized and stay that way. Once your kids start classes, you’ll have a better idea of what they need, and occasionally when. In fact, (I know this is late, but maybe it’ll be useful for next year.) don’t get anything out of the ordinary until your kids need it. This way, you’re not stuck with a bunch of stuff they may not use.
