A stack of notes

inch notesI have printed about an inch worth of notes tonight, the science and math student notes from the week. I’ve got a fair number of pages yet to print. Only a couple of kids in my classes have printers at home. I have great difficulty printing at school, a point that’s moot now that there’s no paper. I’d have to send a job and then run my personal paper across the school, or put my paper in the copier, go to my room to print and then risk my paper being used up by another teacher. I could try to use the computer in the copy room. That has been known to work but it’s a time-consuming and iffy process. Actually, printing from my room virtually never works even on the best of days due to issues with teachers cancelling jobs in the queue. That was true even when the district had paper.

Another teacher who works in a distant, Washington D.C. charter school said, “How do you run out of paper?” (She meant my district, not me personally.)

I have no clue. If we had been given an allocation and had used that allocation up, the paper crisis might be understandable. But this “Oops! No paper!” thing falls into another category– Exponential Ineptitude might be the Jeopardy title.

That teacher and I discussed my conviction that homework has fallen to new lows since people are not willing to use their own paper to print homework. The Washington D.C. teacher observed she absolutely would not be using her own paper to print homework, especially given the low pay in my admittedly impoverished district. I shrugged. They don’t do the homework they copy from the document camera nearly as often as they do homework on clean, white printed sheets.

I liked the suggestion of a former teacher: Have the students take their notes on their bodies in washable ink. That would save my paper and the kids would love it.

In washable markers were cheaper, I might think about his plan. Maybe I could march my class to the Board Office. Those notes on Mercury and Venus running down forearms would make an impressive protest.