r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Zombeaver24 • 13h ago
I'm slightly vexed The amount of perfectly fine colouring pencils one of my teachers (I’m a cleaner) threw out for the new school year
Yes I did remove them from her bin because what the hell!? They’re literally fine. One of my coworkers helps out with an after school club and says they are really short of colouring pencils so they will be used!
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u/Careless_Wait_9361 13h ago
someone get her a pencil sharpener wtf?? im impressed by the things people seem to waste.
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u/Zombeaver24 13h ago
Yeah I know it’s crazy. I know that it’s technically not that big a deal but as someone who hates needless waste it literally broke my heart to see them all chucked away like that.
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u/Adorable_Ad4990 7h ago
I’m a teacher, and this makes my blood boil too. Some kid would LOVE those. In my class sharpening the pencils is a treat for the kids. I use it as a reward and select two students to maintain the pencils, but they don’t always need it because the kids keep up with it.
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u/Careless_Wait_9361 13h ago
from the sizes of pencils, i doubt she does this every year without even properly using all of them. so its a biiiig waste. she can pretty much donate or give some to the children if its kind of like a shopping addiction. idk just throwing them is insane
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u/ElvinO8075 12h ago
The teacher clearly doesn't know that pencils can be sharpened, not thrown away.
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u/LoveMyWeirdness 1h ago
It's more than impressive. It's sickening.
I used to work a paper route in the more affluent section of my hometown, and I was stunned at what these people considered "garbage". When bulk trash day came around, these people would put out things like nice vacuum cleaners, whole patio sets, and even barbecue grills. And there was nothing wrong with most of it. I guess they just wanted new shiny, and they've got the money, so they just upgrade and chuck the old into the landfill. Being wasteful doesn't register to those who don't struggle. If it's not useful to them, it doesn't matter.
I got a lot of good stuff "ghetto shopping" on bulk trash day. Would've gotten more had I had a way to haul the big stuff.
And don't even get me started about how much perfectly good, usable product retail stores throw away, often for no other reason than it didn't sell fast enough. Straight from the factory to the trash. Meanwhile, there are people who are starving and sleeping in the streets.
But they don't care about people, or the earth. They only care about profits. Always have, always will.
Greed, and especially greedy, wasteful corporations, will be what destroys us as a species.
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u/Nimue_- 13h ago
Well that teacher doesn't get to whine about lack of supplies this year
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u/RawrRRitchie 8h ago
Depending on the school some art supplies are only obtained through donations and not the school's art department's(if they even have one) budget. There are a LOT of schools out there that don't have ANY art classes at all.
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u/princesspeachkitty 4h ago
When tf did they start taking art out of school?? Am I just woefully ignorant? I was in SE US for almost all school and we definitely had art
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u/CheeryCherry180 3h ago
I never had an art class when I went to school, huh
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u/princesspeachkitty 3h ago
I'll admit ignorance then, I didnt live in the boonies, but it wasn't an exceptionally urban area either.
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u/Extension-Device-533 11h ago
Any chance it was a mistake, she’d left them to one side for sharpening and they all got swept into the bin by accident? I lost a passport that way (NOT a funny story at all).
Maybe the “cost” (in staff time) of sitting there sharpening them all was more than replacing them. I work in a veterinary practice and we throw away scissors because of this - they cost more to sharpen than replace. (We are as eco as possible with it - they are used in surgical kits until they’re not sharp enough for surgery, then used as general purpose scissors, and then when they’re no good for that any more, we get rid of them - I personally take them to the metal recycling at our council waste site though).
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u/Ijustreadalot 10h ago
Every school I've worked at has had some sort of area (table, shelf, counter) where teachers leave stuff they aren't going to use anymore but other teachers might want. Even if this teacher didn't have time to sharpen all of them, she could have passed them on to someone who wanted them. But I agree that there's a solid chance it was a mistake. If they didn't fall in, she could just be harried and distracted and meant to put the pencils away somewhere and throw something different away.
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u/CeroFs 8h ago
Its one night in front of the tv with a bin and a sharpener..
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u/Ok-Emu-8920 7h ago
I'd probably do that yeah but if the teacher is spending many many of her nights just doing "one thing" or grading "one test" or whatever it definitely adds up to sacrificing more than just "one night" overall
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u/CeroFs 2h ago
I'm not sayin that they don't have better things to do. They do. Being a teacher is hard! What I am saying is that it is wasteful for something that doesn't nes has to cost much time and that there are better solutions than just.. throwing it away. Hell. Could've dropped it in a box with a sharpener and send it off to any organization with children. Even could've asked the kids to spend their free time on it. Bet they won't say no.
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u/Ijustreadalot 6h ago
There have been many points in my life where that is more time in front of the tv than I have to spare, but I've always been aware that someone else did have that time.
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u/onwisconsn 13h ago edited 9h ago
Sounds like the teacher is just like my kids - somehow they think new year of school requires all brand new supplies - 3/4 pencils and erasers just won't do, nor reusing 3 ring binders. Very frustrating.
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u/TrainingSurvey3780 10h ago
i swear it’s the advertising!!! up until i was maybe 14 i would see the big signs in sainsbury’s and on the high street and on the tv about being ‘back to school ready’ and stuff and i just took it for facts like okay yeah i need this stuff because the ads say it’ll make me do better in school
it was the summer before year 11 that i realised wait wtf am i doing buying this stuff just cuz the ad told me to
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u/basicbi- 2h ago
And other kids. One of my biggest regrets is throwing a fit the night before first day of like 1st grade bc my mom had used a couple of my new colored pencils. I was 100000% sure the other kids would know and it would somehow ruin my life 😭 im sorry mom i love you and you can use my shit any time you like
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u/One_Success_9164 11h ago
I work as a cleaner too and about 2 years ago I was emptying one teachers trash and found a massive zipped up bag, I opened it and inside was so so many perfectly good feminine hygiene products. Boxes of unopened pads, tampons, pantyliners... I took all of it home bc wtf? There must have been hundreds worth of perfectly good products in there.
Edit: saved me from having to buy period products for over a year atleast
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u/meowymcmeowmeow 11h ago
I 'saved' so many art supplies from the trash when I did janitorial.
You really want to be mad...take a look at the trash bins in the cafeteria. So much food thrown out, and they still have the gall to charge poor kids.
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u/wischmopp 9h ago
The only valid justification for throwing them away would be that they were dropped from a significant height and now the leads are splintered into a million pieces without any visible damage on the ouside. This means that the tip breaks off over and over again when sharpening them. If that happens to my pencils at home, I don't throw them away, I just try again and again until I can get them to keep a point. But in a school setting, it can be too time-consuming as well as really frustrating for the children. I had to use pencils like these as a kid because my mom would only buy new ones if the old ones were worn down to a nub, not if they had that kind of internal damage, and it often meant that I had to spend half of art class sharpening the same two or three pencils again and again and again. (My school never had communal supplies, so using school pencils wasn't an option.)
But if you try them out and find that they don't have this problem, yeah, that's seriously wasteful.
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u/SwampDiamonds 7h ago edited 7h ago
Art teacher here. This is the correct answer. Broken "lead" within colored pencils makes the pencil unusable and impossible to sharpen. Teacher probably didn't know she could try to salvage these pencils by popping them into an oven at a low temp to remelt the wax inside the pencils.
ETA: zoomed in on pic. Some of those pencils definitely have issues (lead is not centered in the wood, which means it will never sharpen correctly).
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u/Old-Bid-9563 6h ago
Thank you for the tip in saving broken pencils. I have some that are years old that I didn't want to throw out and can now use.
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u/SwampDiamonds 5h ago
No problem, just don't forget to keep an eye on the colored pencils in your oven. I made a real mess on a baking sheet once that way...they totally melted 😂
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u/Kyro0098 5h ago
Can you hand sharpen the uncentered ones? Like you do with construction pencils and a razor blade. Not the kids obviously, no knives for them. Just curious about it in general.
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u/SwampDiamonds 5h ago
You sure can, I use an X-acto knife or a box cutter. You just have to be okay with that pencil never having a super sharp tip (and the uneven pressure means it will always be prone to break easily).
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u/Jacktheforkie 4h ago
Yes but generally schools would not allow possession of a knife for this purpose, though a file would likely be fine albeit slower
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u/Kyro0098 4h ago
Lol, my high school was rural, so technically there was a no knife policy, but somehow every shop kid could still sharpen a construction pencil. I know some college friends had a metal detector where they went to high school though.
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u/Jacktheforkie 2h ago
Wow, here in the uk we aren’t allowed knives but no metal detectors or searches
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u/kikinc14 6h ago
OR they all fell in the toilet and the wood soaked up the water. Also valid IMO.
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u/SwampDiamonds 5h ago
My other thought as an art teacher is that something... unfortunate...happened and they were deemed Too Gross To Save
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u/LaundryMan2008 12h ago
Go on r\dumpsterdiving and see what big corps throw out, the most expensive thing I’ve pulled was £280 worth of electrical installations stuff like plugs and panels
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u/Alarming_Definition9 5h ago
If by plugs you mean outlets, be very careful. To my knowledge, those usually aren't dumped unless there's something very wrong with them.
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u/LaundryMan2008 4h ago
They were completely brand new, box wasn’t even opened, the seal was still on it, that company tends to dump loads of new stuff after each project so they are extremely likely to be the result of that, I don’t touch any of the opened stuff unless I can fully test it and safely so or if it’s ones that spilled out of weakly sealed boxes.
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u/Alarming_Definition9 4h ago
I appreciate your rational response.
I hate when companies are wasteful like that. Glad to know you're safe about it. I've run into people on here (by that I mean Reddit as a whole) who think electrical work is easy and not at all as dangerous as it is (for those wanting to argue: survivor's fallacy is a thing people, please look it up).
I erred on the side of caution and gave you a tip, hoping that if you needed it then you'd heed it. And hopefully anyone who reads it understands that electrical components are not something one should usually trust when gotten from the trash.
Hope you have good one.
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u/LaundryMan2008 3h ago
I even found an LTO-6 tape drive on a pallet of scrap servers being absolutely rained on, big sheet of paper saying SCRAP on it and there was a tape library buried in between them all, I carefully unscrewed the blue thumb screws on the drive to remove it from the library, contortioned my arm between the fence and pulled it out, I saw a full set of 2.5TB tapes gleaming in the rainy light but it was just too far deep in to reach through the gap I made from the missing drive.
I’d wish I got the library but the servers were stacked on top and the place was closed because it was a Sunday when I usually do my dives at, that on its own is an easy £750 and the drive being another £200 on top, next day, they were gone.
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u/Alarming_Definition9 2h ago
Hearing/seeing stuff like that makes me angry cry. That valuable of stuff just being thrown out is just so wrong.
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u/LaundryMan2008 2h ago
That tape drive is now a nice to have spare to my primary tape backup units, my ones are LTO-5 so I don’t want to waste a LTO-6 drive’s wear and tear on LTO-5 tapes, it will definitely earn a sacred place in my URMS rack so it can live a life reading customer tapes in my future business since it’s one generation newer than anything I have at the moment.
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u/FoxxyRin 8h ago
I promise you she probably had a reason. Throwing them out is dumb, she should have asked around or sent them to the art room or something but depending on grades, need, etc. there's plenty of reasons she may not want them for her classroom.
For example, it's common for elementary teachers to only want the 8/16 packs of crayons because the 24 counts have too many confusing options. You tell a small child to get red and there's at least 50% chance they grab something that looks red but isn't. In the 8/16 counts there is no "red-violet" or whatever to confuse them.
Perhaps they were a shitty batch and kept breaking. I've had this happen with colored pencils I ordered online, likely a shipping thing. Otherwise there's other issues they could possibly have that you can't see.
Also the kids could just not like them. Or maybe it was a communal bucket situation and she got tired of kids arguing over them and changed her class requirements for every kid to bring their own pack.
So yeah, wasteful to toss, but I promise she probably had good reason to want them gone.
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u/Giraffe1317 11h ago
Please tell me you rescued them???
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u/Zombeaver24 11h ago
Yes I did, they went to an after school club one of my coworkers helps out with, she said they are low on colouring crayons
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u/Tango_Owl 13h ago
I'm glad you've saved them and they'll get a good second life! This would have been such a waste otherwise.
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u/SherbetLemon1926 8h ago
I’m a teacher and unless the pencils are tiny stumps by the end of the year, I bag them up and raffle them off to the kids. Winners get pencils for home and I get rid of my pencils to get fresh ones at the beginning of the year
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u/msarachnid 8h ago
My mom works at an elementary school and teachers are always throwing out such nice stuff. My favorite day of the year is when i get to go in and go garbage picking and take what theyre throwing away (not just getting rid of, but throwing out). A few weeks ago we found a set of magna-tiles!
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u/ProovenHedgehog 9h ago
Some really old pencil crayons go "stale", affecting the vividness and blendability. But they'd probably still be fine for general classroom use even so... 😅
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u/analogpursuits 2h ago
Leave a note and ask them to set aside those for the after school program. Or lobby the school administrators to ask the teachers to all do this. Win win for everyone! Even better, start an art supply library, so the kids can get art supplies for personal use.
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u/KoalaCapp 12h ago
I've found when a pencil is dropped too many times the lead colour bit inside had cracked and when you sharpen it it always breaks.
This may be the case here.
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u/sadbeehoppy 9h ago
I work in childcare and the amount of waste the company expects us to be okay with is absolutely insane. I'm frequently laughed at for my tendencies to try and save everything lol
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u/bancheeshit 7h ago
I've used that exact brand of pencils before, and they were really waxy. i had horrible luck getting them to color well because they were so light. i think i donated mine. it was really strange because Staedtler is generally a good brand. it was just the Norris color ones that were a bit odd, in my experience.
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u/Creepy_Vegetable6905 7h ago
R / coloredpencils in shambles. Granted those aren’t the top notch artist quality stuff but hey if you need to get rid of perfectly good stationary at least gift them to a kid!!!!
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u/CrayCray_Sicily 7h ago
When I saw the thumbnail on the notification I thought they were little tiny nibs, but when I actually clicked on the image I gasped. What the hell?? They're perfectly fine! Good on you for saving them
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u/Guinea_pigs_rule 3h ago
Same kinda stuff happens at my partner's school. So many books and supplies that're perfectly fine ever year. We always save what we can and donate it
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u/derson78 3h ago
It was probably something to do with the budget. The more you can write off at the end of a year, the better chance you have of keeping your budget high.
It's still daft to bin them, but at least they found a good home.
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u/DeterminedErmine 12h ago
What an ahole. I work at a poor school, if I made up little packs of pencils for kids to take home (or just put out a bucket of em) they’d be over the moon
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u/MAXQDee-314 6h ago
How many noses were hiding those pencils, how much unwashed hair of any sort were hiding those pencils?
If an underfunded person is throwing away, "Perfectly good!", supplies...
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u/tetheredvoid ORANGE 6h ago
Have you tried soap? I hear it's great for disinfecting non-porous objects!
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u/MAXQDee-314 6h ago
Not my problem. If the teacher is throwing away good materials, it means something other than poor thinking on their part. Actually if they are 'poor thinking', they wouldn't have thrown them away.
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u/tetheredvoid ORANGE 5h ago
Why are you even here? Just to be mad at something that doesn't affect you?
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u/MAXQDee-314 5h ago
I am not angry. I am unsure as to why you are...?
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u/Zombeaver24 4h ago
Just to clarify, this teacher is the type of person that needs everything looking immaculate and perfect. I’m not gonna diagnose her but I believe it’s very ocd coded behaviour. Apparently a couple years ago she was reprimanded for throwing out lots of half used/barely used glue sticks and replaced them with fresh ones out the box and someone found out. I find it highly unlikely that these pencils were contaminated or anything as this is kinda a pattern of behaviour for her. And like the person above commented, they can all be disinfected rather easily
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u/The-Protector19 5h ago
I want to slap that teacher across the head for throwing them away now. -_- But at least they are being used now. Excellent and expensive brand too. I had to specially order mine.
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u/AgreeableTrouble5733 6h ago
Oh y'all would be flabbergasted by the school dumpsters at the end of each school year.
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u/QU33NN00B 2h ago
My grandfather’s second wife was a custodian for many years and had quite the collection of things that were just tossed
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u/LoveMyWeirdness 1h ago
Considering most teachers pay for most of their supplies out of their own pocket, you'd think she'd have wanted to save and reuse as much as possible!
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u/Grand_Pace_9873 9h ago
As a artist this broke something in me. Months of coloring are still left in those pencils.
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u/SudhaTheHill 13h ago
They aren’t even those low quality ones. Staedtler pencils cost so much!