Pencil Sharpener Befuddlement

A simple manual pencil sharpener...you know, the kind with a hand crank that’s shaped like a teardrop that you have to empty every single day? Yeah. The old-school kind. Well, my kids were taking a test today that requires a #2 pencil. I, of course, must provide them with one because...well...parents won't buy school supplies and if they do, the kids won't bring them. That’s how it is these days. So, I gave them brand new, shiny, unsharpened pencils to use in my class and pointed to the sharpener.

Let me mention also that I had two electric sharpeners. I say had because I no longer have them. These ghetto-ass kids broke them within the first week because they were shoving the pencils in so hard it burned up the motor or broke the sharpening mechanism. One, someone tried to sharpen their pen in. So...manual only from here on out.

I noticed the line wasn’t moving. I had, like, 20 kids wrapping around the room waiting for the sharpener, so I noticed something was wrong. The first kid in line had 3 other kids trying to help him. They couldn’t figure out how to work the manual sharpener. Totally perplexed, they were wiggling the shavings holder. They kept rotating the handle, but then sometimes they'd just move it back and forth. One of them finally figured out that the handle was supposed to crank in a continuous motion, but was doing it backwards, so it wasn't sharpening anything.

Seriously. So, I did what any good teacher would have done: I watched with disbelief and tried to stifle the laughter and debated about whether or not I should pull out my camera phone and video it for submission to YouTube.

Eventually, one of the enlightened ones showed them what to do.

These teenagers are our nation’s future. You might want to contemplate emigration.