r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Zombeaver24 • 14h 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

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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/wischmopp 11h 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 9h ago edited 9h 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 8h 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 7h 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 😂