Get Your Hands Off My Sharpie

Ever try to take somebody’s last roll of adhesive tape?

Ever ask to borrow the only available marker?

Ever attempt to use a colleague’s Post-It notes without written permission?

Ever consider running off with a box of paper?

Of course not; you’d no more walk off with these supplies than you’d purloin someone’s purse or burgle a neighbor’s house.

Let’s face it: a carjacking would be easier to explain than taking somebody else’s podium. In our department, people leave huge signs affixed to the old, chipped, wooden, desktop podiums saying “DO NOT REMOVE THIS FROM ROOM 202 EVER.”

I’m not even kidding.

Within any “learning environment,” rich or poor, competition for supplies is fierce. I don’t care if you are at UConn (where we run out of paper in the English Department at the end of every fiscal year) or Dartmouth (I remember one of my instructors carrying loose lightbulbs from his apartment in a sack in order to have more light in his office, so fearful was he of making an official request): If you take somebody else’s tape dispenser, you are just asking to be buried with a stake through your heart.

Look, I have trouble getting the two doctoral students under my supervision to quit squabbling over the “grape” scented marker; I know things must be tough all over.

When I asked Erica, who’s taught at a Colorado college for the last 17 years, what she thought about the Great Battle for Stuff, she instantly emailed me — despite having way too much to do without indulging her old friend’s request for information — the following screed: “Here we fight over scissors and hanging folders. Finding a stapler that works is regarded as important and as impossible  as finding true love (plus with a stapler, you get replacements).”

One art teacher — OK, she works in a secondary school, but still — simply saves everything. She has 238 coffee-cans in her garage. Somebody might need to make drums out of them, or she can use them for storage. The trouble is, what she really needs to store are all those coffee cans. Eva-Marie’s way of dealing with a shortage of supplies in her district is to overcompensate by collecting odds and ends the way a magnet collects iron filings. It’s sort of random. She collects stuff with the unstoppable force of a tornado, which means that she often seems as if she’s living in the middle of one.

We must deal with the uncanny attraction that school supplies hold even for those of us privileged enough to teach at the university level; after all, many of us have lusted after these objects since our earliest youth. If we’re being honest, many of us became teachers so that we would have control over these objects. 

I became a teacher because I passionately longed to write on the blackboard.

As a little kid, I dreamed of teaching a class. Since it was a dream, I saw myself writing neat straight sentences across green slate with An-Du-Septic chalk. In real life, however, there are no more blackboards — and even when there were, my handwriting was always slanted so far upwards that by the end of the sentence I’d be standing on tiptoes.

Besides, over the years I’ve learned never to turn my back on a crowd. I don’t use the board anymore.

If competition for supplies and niceties in the classroom is tough, then competition in the faculty lounge — or the cramped room that passes for one — turns us feral. Faculty lounges everywhere have only one thing in unlimited supply: napkins from Dunkin’ Donuts which, although they look new are nevertheless suspiciously crumpled thereby carrying a faint threat of infection from some unknown, possibly infectious, previous user. In addition, there are coffee mugs reading “No Teacher Left Behind” or “I (Heart) Books” which fester on window sills unclaimed. In the refrigerator you’ll find an open two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, half a bagel, one piece of Laughing Cow cheese in the round box, one blueberry muffin with an expiration date from 1998 on the wrapper, and an open pint of fat-free half-and-half, which since it is made from petrochemicals has no expiration date, but still doesn’t look so hot.

In contrast, bottled water is like Dom Perignon: people guard every bottle obsessively and threaten bodily harm if theirs is so much as touched by a stranger.

Of course in the best institutions, necessities always abundant: These — as we know — are enthusiasm, love for the profession, delight in our students, and a sense of humor.

Although a fresh Sharpie and a new podium wouldn’t hurt.

(adapted from Education World)