I Really Do Need That Yellow Binder

Last summer, a video circulated on social media of a lady known as One Funny Mother, and it’s making the rounds again. In the video, a woman circles what looks like Target, ranting about people who complain about buying supplies off of teachers’ lists. I’ve never met her, but I love her.

As a mom, I know that back-to-school shopping gets expensive. When my kids were in elementary school, I spent around $50 per kid for school supplies. The amount went up when they hit middle school and had multiple teachers asking for stuff. When it was time for high school, there were things like large capacity flash drives and engineering-grade calculators that jacked my totals above the triple digit watermark. Multiply that by three kids, and add in the uniforms and backpacks and other things my progeny deemed necessary, and it made me clutch my pearls at the checkout.

As a teacher, though, I am unapologetic about my supply list. I put a lot of thought and energy into planning for the school year, and I am very circumspect about putting together my supply list. When I put a 1" binder with five dividers on my supply list, it’s because I want to help your kids stay organized and learn how to manage their paperwork. We have a section for all the vocabulary terms they’ll be learning. There’s a section for notes that I give them to help them make sense of what can be really challenging material. There’s a section for all of their writing that I ask them to archive in the binder so that they can go back and analyze trends and see if they need help learning how to use things like a semi-colon correctly. There’s a section for old tests and quizzes so that they’ll have them at the ready when it’s time to prepare for the midterm and final exams. The last divider is for miscellaneous stuff that I haven’t even thought of needing a section for yet, so I guess you could call that an extravagance if you really wanted to.

I ask kids to bring in notebook paper because, since it is an English class, we will be writing. I am specific about the size of the paper because grabbing a stack of papers, tapping it into order on my table, and then finding two or three pages sticking out an extra half inch is just wrong. Don’t do that to me. Just buy the…

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