Making somethin' out of Nothin'

I had an amazing week a few weeks ago where I really felt like I was some kind of ridiculous fairy making wonderful things appear to kids. Both of these thing I'd say may be slightly laughable out of context but to me, a world of difference in my classroom. Both of my magical feats stemmed from annoyances.

Annoyance #1: No rulers in a class (or perhaps maybe 2 out of 30), and kids need them for Geography and Math. Solution: I got kids to make their own out of old juice and milk boxes. I cut them out and made a demo and then took them to my class expecting some, but more lukewarm response. What I got was over the top craziness---the kids all had to have one---I ended up making some for each of my grade 8 classes and I saw some examples that were even better than mine. The response can be summed up by a quote from one kid in my 8c class, "Are these for free?" The amazing Oshilombo brings gifts. LOL.

Annoyance #2: There is never a class that goes by where every kid has a function pen or pencil. This one drives me nuts! How can you do a test or say "take notes" or anything, if the kid only had one pen, and it died this morning and there family won't get another one until next week. I tried a pen loaning program, which I will continue but it is a hassle and kids have stolen the ink from inside, etc. etc. One day a kid asked to buy my pen and I said no. I surveyed the kids and found out that $N2.50 is the standard going rate in town for pens. Went to town and found a nice Indian wholesale that sells cheap Chinese pens, 50 for $N20. (That's $N0.40 a pen or roughly CDN 5cents per pen). So I go back to school and charge $N1 per pen (that's ~13cents) and the kids think its a joke I'm selling them so cheap (they think that I'm getting ripped off). Yet I'm making a $N0.60 profit (that's 8cents) on each pen making mark-up a grand 250%. That may seem like pitiful pennies to you, but really it accomplishes two things--piece of mind in my classroom (or a little more at least), and allows me to do a mini-fundraiser for something small but needed at school (I'm thinking about an exam feeding program so that the kids don't have to write exams on empty stomachs), but we'll see.

Anyway, just another week in Omungwelume.