The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 231: How to Make School Life as Inefficient as Possible

Every family was given a list of things to purchase, as follows.

• Chromebook cover (dimensions of Chromebook not specified)
• A 3-hole binder
• Paper for said binder
• 30 pencils (to bring to school all at once?!?)
• 20 Black or blue pens (same rant)
• An entire set of colored pencils (oh, fine, keep it all separate due to COVID-19 rather than let the kids share)
• Highlighters (ditto rant)
• Basic calculator (not sure what that means, back in my day you weren’t allowed to use calculators for any calculation that was purely composed of the basic four operations).
• Earbuds
• Ruler
• Tissues
• Dry erase markers

Multiply this by every student at the school, for every school everywhere.

Suddenly, the local store was invaded by thousands of local parents, combing the aisles for the requisite items. The smarter ones among them put their kids to work and called it a scavenger hunt.

I wasn’t smart. I was lazy. I allowed my husband, the shopper of the family, to buy most of the items. Of course, he went online. 

I was already in rant mode, but soon, so was he. After all, he reasoned, the school knew what size Chromebooks they would issue to the students, but they didn’t tell us. I reassured him that it could just wait.

But of course, we were both annoyed. At the point at which he constructed a shopping cart, and before we hit the buy button, we contemplated what would have happened if a school administrator had constructed the same cart, bumped up the quantity of each item to the number of students enrolled in the school, and hit buy. About a minute of extra work. How much extra work would it have taken to note the cost of the items and bump up the student school fees accordingly? Very little.

But no, instead they spread the work onto all the families, multiplying it all unnecessarily. In fact, even the monetary aspect was multiplied. You know that if you buy a hundred of a thing, you can often buy it at a lower price, right? Another year, the daughter was told to come to school with a three-hole pencil case that sits in a 3-ring binder. My husband, the shopper, found them online. A hundred dollars for a hundred of them. Or eight dollars for one. Facepalm.

Now, there could be reasons for all this. Maybe the schools have so little surplus in funds that they can’t even wait those few weeks for students to pay their fees to cover the cost of the pre-purchased equipment. Maybe distributing the supplies to the students would be logistically annoying. (Though personally, I’d turn this into a planning task for the oldest grade of students, and make it a school community bonding experience to execute on the first day of school). Not being a PTA-parent type of person, there are details I could be missing.

But really, is this at all a reasonable way to do things? Not at all. It can easily waste half a day for a family. Multiply it all out by all the families doing this shopping, and – ugh. And who of us has the time and energy to campaign to their school about changing the procedures? I don’t – I used all of mine up just listening to my husband ranting while he shopped.

It didn’t stop there. When my daughter had been at school a few days, it transpired she didn’t actually have all the right supplies. We’d missed the fact that several subjects required their own 3-ring binder, one of them needed a composition notebook, and another a spiral-bound notebook. Woe to us if we got those wrong (according to my perfectionist kid at least). And with all those extra binders, it looked like my kid was going to have to purchase a second entire school bag to carry everything, and keep a pack mule to carry the bags. That’s not counting the bag where she keeps the Chromebook, because that already didn’t fit.

Tell me, how many ring binders and composition notebooks does your average business executive carry? I suspect zero. He carries a laptop, of course.

In this day and age, there is no good reason why kids need to write things in multiple different notebooks and carry heavy textbooks around all day. This is why they are issued laptops by the school. Wait, it’s not? Is it so that now they can carry a stack of books plus a laptop?

In my dreams, schools would have workstations that allowed any kid to log onto any computer. Their school-issued laptops would live at home for doing homework. School lunches would be allergen-free and be provided at zero cost for all students. (I applaud our school district for the latter during COVID-19. It hasn’t helped my gluten-free kids, but hopefully for some families it has made a difference). And their water bottles, issued by the school, kept on special shelves, with cleaning supplies available to wash them periodically, could live at school and be refilled as needed.

What would my kids need to carry to school at this point? Not much. I suspect we’d still have them carry a phone. I can see art and music equipment being a separate thing. Still, that’s a long way from the situation our family has right now, where I’m contemplating having my kid travel to school by camel. Actually, maybe I’ve just discovered another reason (among others I won’t go into right now), why so many kids get driven to school when they genuinely live within walking distance.

So many problems that would go away at this point. Not just the problem of carrying things, but also the time taken to acquire them. 

Is it really that bad, you ask? After all, it’s half a day of shopping, once a year, and after the initial shock of doing it the first time, it presumably gets easier. But it’s more than that.

I can handle one such annoyance. I can’t handle fifty of them.

And since I have expended screen space on this blog to rant about all the different tasks that make life complicated, we all know that there are many such things. Things that would stop being done so inefficiently all over the place if people were willing to do things differently. 

I admit that I haven’t come up with a great solution for this problem that doesn’t involve a massive school-level campaign that nobody seems to have the energy for. I think that if men were suddenly saddled with these tasks, they wouldn’t launch a campaign. They’d just let the tasks fly by and their kids would go to school without the “right” supplies. (Apologies to my husband for the generalization. He genuinely is the only man I know who does this kind of shopping). All the kids would sort of flop and flounder through their day doing all their work with one pencil or pen on borrowed scraps of paper, and nobody would die. And maybe, just maybe, the schools would wake up and decide to do things differently.

Will the women do such a collective task-drop? Of course not. Whichever one of us does such a thing will, quite reasonably, fear being the only one, and then our kid will be the one and only kid in their class miserably wandering through their day and fearing the disapproval of their teachers for not having the right items on hand. When it’s our kids’ suffering that’s on the line, we step up.

But I would like to propose a few modifications that might give you some relief. I think you can change the process in a few key ways, and save yourself some stress. Here’s what I suggest you keep in mind:

1. The deadline for buying these supplies is not as strict as you think.

You really don’t need to rush. As far as I know, nobody has died from not bringing a highlighter to school.

Those darn Chromebook covers? We waited till we had the kid’s Chromebook in our hands and bought a cover that we already knew we ourselves liked (it has carry handles, a shoulder strap, and a luggage strap, how exciting is that?).

The items that weren’t easily available? (Probably because every other parent had participated in a panic-buying spree). We waited till we were next doing shopping. No special trips to the store. For online shopping, if it came with a longer delivery date, so be it.

Again, let me reiterate. As far as I know, nobody has died from not bringing a highlighter to school.

Heck, even if you supposedly need colored pencils for art, your artwork that day can be a very sophisticated black and white.

The items whose descriptions we couldn’t understand? We waited an extra few days till our kid came home from that class and explained to us what was needed.

2. The shopping doesn’t actually have to be done by you.

I’m not assuming that all of you have a spouse who will conveniently take the shopping off your hands. I assume your kids have some vague notion that they’re supposed to have those supplies?

Great – you can take them to the store with you, and while you go get groceries, they can take that list of supplies and be let loose in the relevant aisles of the relevant store. A kid can also be trained to create an online shopping cart, or compare prices of items. If you need to teach them this time, they’ll know for next time. A kid who already knows how to do this can show a younger kid how to do this. If you want to allow them to spend an extra few dollars to also pick up some fun item for themselves, go ahead.

3. Any surplus, save in one big box

If your kid, or the next oldest kid, ever needs more of the same stuff, first go shopping in that box.

But my kid doesn’t care and they’ll miss some or most of the items on their list.

So? They’ll suffer from not having a highlighter at the right moment. They might – shock-horror – have to just underline the relevant sentence with the same color pen as they are writing with. You know, like you and I did when we were at school.

Will it kill them? No. They can join you on your next shopping trip and repeat the whole fun scavenger hunt. As many times as needed. At a time that’s convenient for you.

But the teacher will send me a nasty email.

Sorry, I missed that email, I’ve been too busy catching up on school communication (another source of overwhelm) and I’m not up to date yet (or so I’ll tell everyone).

These situations aren’t easy, but you can slack off some of the time!

Previous posts in this series:

• The Conspiracy To Keep Women Busy ™
• The Conspiracy To Keep Women Busy ™ – Part 197: School Activities

• Category: Productivity