Let's be school supplies

I'm an AR-15.

I'm the brand new Aladdin metal lunchbox. *It HAS to be Aladdin brand, because their artwork is raised, not the cheaper Thermos brand. Fuck those losers!

I'm the WIZ locker backpack. My commercials were incessant in the early 1990s.

New "good" shoes to start the new school year.

I'm leading late twentieth-century artist Christian Riese Lassen.

I’m the box of exactly-the-same school supplies shipped straight to the kids’ doors. Since the kids are only allowed exactly what is mandated on the school supplies list, in the exact colors specified there’s no incentive for little Johnny to go BTS shopping. A company takes the school supplies list, throws everything in a box and ships it to students’ doors for $80.

The days of expressing oneself with a Lisa Frank notebook are OVER. He just needs to bring one one 1” red binder, one two-pocket plastic folder in red, another in royal blue, another in orange and another in green, one 50ct box of yellow number two pencils with eraser, etc.

On Meet The Teacher day, before school starts, all the kids are bring their own boxes of supplies and dump them in a box where they are mixed up and redistributed among the other kids, so don’t bother buying little Johnny decent headphones or any functional brands like Expo dry erase markers, because Kai’s mommy who drives the new black Escalade is buying dried-up Dollar Tree markers and already-falling-apart composition books and when it all gets mixed up and redistributed, guess what little Johnny gets? That’s right, the worse than useless shit that is destined for one of the subcontinents of plastic floating around in the ocean in two months.

R6 Bitter Betty. Cry more

Are there feline AIDS and bedbugs on those supplies?

I’m the “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” sticker book which encourages you to put them on your locker.

R7 = Kai’s mommy

I used to love back-to-school shopping. Late August was one of my favorite times of the year.

I'm a gallon-sized water bottle. I cost $75.

I'm a shitty Mac Book with a broken screen and busted battery. I should have been thrown out and replaced four years ago, but my owner's parents think I can make it one more year.

I'm the latest Apple Watch, smart phone, and MacBook Air. Last year's models won't do and have been given to help's children.

I’m the Lisa Frank unicorn folders and notebooks.

I’m the new Levi’s cords and a Hang Ten shirt for the first day of class.

I'm the Elmer's Glue stick. Eventually, I'll be used to "glue" hands together.

"I'm the banilla paper we 'posed to bring to school with us!"

Velcro being pulled apart is a fetish sound for me

I'm No. 2 pencils. No one has ever laid eyes on a No. 1 or No. 3 pencil, but one thing is for sure: They are strictly forbidden. The pencils MUST be No. 2.

And I'm the mysterious words "Eberhard Faber." A company? A person? A description? No one knows.

I'm the distinctive sound of a cheap pencil box exploding its contents when it falls off a desk and onto the floor.

I’m the crazy erasers that are too cool to actually use!

A slide rule for 9th grade math and science….big boy time.

R21 you are amazing

I'm looseleaf reinforcements.

I’m the spoiled kid who judges his new classmates by the brands they wear and brand name school supplies

I’m the erasable pen that the cool kids always try to use that teachers absolutely loathe.

I'm a composition notebook.

Maybe half a dozen pages of me will ever be used. I'll be thrown out nearly empty when the locker is emptied at the end of the year.

Don't try to tear a page out of me, or I will literally fall apart at the seams.

I’m the asshole 5th grade math teacher who refers to Trapper Keepers as “Trapper Losers” and who instills a lifelong hatred of math in all his students.

I think my middle school banned Trapper Keepers r29

I'm smelly markers.

R30 I’m not surprised. A lot of teachers seemed to have issues with them, though I never understood why.

I'm scratch-and-sniff anything.

I’m the grocery bags my mom set aside to use as math and history book covers

I'm a circle compass. I was on the supply list but odds are I'll never be used once, except by bullies who are excited by the potential of the pointy metal end.

I’m the cut-up brown-paper grocery sacks that are used by practical and frugal parents as book covers. Most of the children who have to carry me around despise me with all their might, but there’s always one artistic child who will decorate me.

I'm the prized lunchbox Thermos that someone once put milk in, so now it will stink of sour milk forever.

I'm the other prized lunchbox Thermos that someone dropped, shattering the glass inside. The idea of a Thermos full of shattered glass slivers and juice is the stuff of nightmares.

R37 you are the slow kid who didn’t scan the thread before posting. Special Ed classes are over in Building 2.

I can't remember. Were we FORCED to put book covers on? Or were we all good little citizens and did it for brownie points? I didn't mind using paper bags. I was a VERY crafty kid and my school was somewhat hippy adjacent.

I'm the erasers on the pencils.

I wear down, or snap off, within a week. The student has bitten down hard on the ferrule, trying to squish a bit more eraser out, but it's really no use.

Eventually, he'll have to resort to these fuckers, which pop off the end of the pencil the moment you start to erase anything.

R33 Thanks for that. Never knew most of those issues. Though they were a bit of a tight squeeze in some lockers, as I remember.

R40 In my school (and I’d imagine most) covers were a requirement. Teachers would chew out those who didn’t early on.

r40 we had to have our books covered by a certain date. If we didn't, it counted as a missing homework assignment.

I'm the provocatively named Pink Pearl erasers.

I'm a graphing calculator, destined to be used once or twice, then kept in a drawer for 20 years because it was kind of expensive, and it must have SOME use. (Spoiler: No.)

I'm Liquid Paper.

10% of me will be used to correct mistakes, even though I'm too slick and bumpy to write on.

20% of me will be used in impromptu art projects, defacing books.

70% of me will dry up and crumble in the bottle.

I’m the fresh batch of blue ink and ditto paper on the counter, next to the teachers’ mailboxes.

I'm the principal's office secretary's new stretchaneeny pantsuit in two-toned diarrhea brown.

I’m the alternative to liquid paper: the adhesive white strip applied like measuring tape. Good luck getting me in a straight line.

I'm LA Gear shoes with lights in the heels.

Or I'm the short-lived Converse EFX shoes with blue gel on top. You could squish it with your finger.

What —for pre-K R51?

I’m the eraser you had to mail off empty saved Fritos packs to get.

You excitedly checked the mailbox every day until I arrived!

I’m the older brother of R16, who knows the cooler high school kids are already switching over to the Op label…and the hot chicks are wearing Chemin de Fer jeans.

R53 ¡Yo recuerdo!

Something supplied by teachers: I’m the photocopied homework that’s always off-centre and with a diagonal slant.

I’m the box of 64 Crayola crayons with a built in sharpener, and the aquamarine color is broken!

I'm the crappy RoseArt crayons made of wax that doesn't color smoothly, seething with envy at R57's 64 Crayola box with buit-in sharpener. My owner will eat me, anyway.

Great idea for a thread, OP!

I'm the first generation of mechanical pencils. You know the ones. Shitty little things.

I'm the hierarchy of pens. Plain Bic ballpoints are at the bottom. Then rollerballs, then Razorpoints, then colored gel pens, then these:

R60 mechanical pencils were in common use for many, many decades before the the 80s… did you drop out before high school graduation?

For school use, they go back to the beginning of the 20th century….

The ultimate in pen swag was these. They seldom worked right, but their size alone made an impressive statement.

I'm the eraser at R53. I'm spotted by the green-haired, face-pierced enby going through boxes of grandma's stuff as the family prepares to move her into assisted living. The enby furiously takes a photo of me that is posted on Twitter and Instagram and within an hour results in dozens of hot takes on TikTok. Within two days, there are think pieces on Medium, Substack, and dozens of clickbait sites about what my existence says about marginalized peoples and the ongoing genocidal effort to keep migrants, refugees, and people of color out of our cities to reinforce the Eurocentric hegemony.

I knew I was an eraser, but I never knew I was committing erasure of indigenous peoples. Ay yai yai.

You’re not wrong R64 - but to be historically truthful there was enough of a Mexican-American backlash against The Frito Bandito in the early 70s that he was replaced by W.C. Fritos as the mascot a few years after they offered this eraser.

I'm the condoms and morning-after pills.

I’m the schoolwide ban on Crayola boxes more than the 24 pack to avoid jealous rages.

I'm Pee-Chee!

And a real peach, to boot…. Those folders subsidized most every h.s. student store clear through to the 80s.

Paper bag covers were definitely required at my high school. I don’t remember shopping every year, but I do remember making sure I had an adequate stock of clean paper bags.

They were great for copying entirely inappropriate poetry onto. I remember that I had malest conrnifici tuo catullo (the poem itself not the title) written on the cover of my calculus book.

I am a graphing calculator to go with Ginsberg during calculus class.

R11 I think all us gaylings did. It was our precursor to retail mall shopping.

I'm the Scholastic book catalog distributed a couple weeks into the school year. I have something for everyone, from the nerd to the popular kid. (Well, everyone except the very poor kids.)

My teachers would cover the cost so that everyone had at least a few books.

I’m R73 and I don’t understand how Let’s Be threads work

I'm the very cheap toilet paper. Kids will waste time trying to get clean w/ me instead of real toilet paper!

I understood completely…I made a side comment in reply to the one above… your comment was merely snide.

I'm just the right size (for me) box of Kleenex. Not the tiny ass pocket packs or the obnoxious big square box either.

I’m no school supplies in an inner city school, struggling for funds.

I'm graph paper.

I'm a plastic ruler with 3 holes so I can go right in your 3-ring binder.

But if you had one of these in your 3-ring binder, you were [italic]really[/italic] tricked out for the school year:

I ordered r53.

I'm a soft pack of camel lights.

I'm these tabbed binder dividers.

I come with fiddly little paper inserts for the tabs that have to be folded and slipped into the tabs.

I'm made by Avery or Mead.

I'm the freshly run off dittos the teacher hands out at the start of class. All the students furiously sniff them like we're drug addicts looking for a fix.

We never had fancy school supplies. I was jealous of a girl who had a pencil case that looked like this:

I did have this pencil case, though.

In retrospect, it was a cool pencil case.

I still have my Frito Bandito eraser. It’s sitting on my desk in a holder along with my mini troll as I type:

I'm the kid in China same age as kids with all these supplies. I am working 50 hours a week for $2 a day at the factory . I am 8 and live in a dormitory with 300 kids.

R88, we're the unionized workers at the American paper mills, pencil factories, and plastic manufacturing companies. We made all these supplies.

But that was then.

I’m the corduroys from the Husky department of Bradlee’s.

Check out this vintage USSR pencil case.

I'm a Barbie book cover hidden under a GI Joe book cover.

No.. it would be a Hot Wheels cover!🔥🔥🙃

I’m the hidden pouch in my trapper to hide my edibles.

I had never heard of a Trapper Keeper until Project Runway!

We're a slide rule and a pocket protector. We're de rigueur for mathletes and other nerds.

I'm years of penises and boobs. I'm doodled on every illustration and in the margins of the dogeared textbooks you'll be issued.

Some of the artists will have graduated college by now, but new generations are enjoying their work, like the classic illustration of a big fat doobie dangling from the mouth of Thomas Jefferson, accompanied by a word balloon coming from Benjamin Franklin's mouth: "put on some Zep man."

I'm Junior's first jockstrap.

I'm this.

I’m a new Smurfs lunch box circa 1981

I'm the new Demetre ski sweater that can't be worn because first day of school is 83F.

I'm a Big Chief tablet.

I’m the blue book used at prep school. Public school kids wouldn’t see me until college—if they’re lucky.

I'm three-ring binders, spiral notebooks, scissors, and desks. I take great joy in watching left-handed children struggle.

White paste, tastes great.

I'm the cigar box recycled as a school supplies container.

I'm the home pregnancy test.

R106. Did you see TKAM?

I'm the Adderall and Accutane. I am taken by everyone in class.

I’m contraband Binaca aerosol breath spray.

I'm lube, PrEP, Le Douche 24-pack and a 12-foot rope.

Yes, r108, but I'd forgotten it began with the cigar box.

I’m the brand-new, beautifully sharpened pencils.

I'm the Sheaffer's Peacock Blue fountain pen ink.

It was a sure indicator of your sexual orientation.

I'm the crappy plastic safety scissors that are used for cutting the awful smelling construction paper for crafts.

I’m rubber cement.

Smell me.

I’m the 2 finger lid stuffed in my sock.

I'm the giant, overstuffed Jansport backpack. I'm filled up with all the supplies mentioned in this thread and multiple heavy textbooks.

Good luck with the back pain you'll have to deal with as an adult after years of carrying me from class to class.

Hey r118–leave the supplies in your locker.

I'm the Five Star notebook. College-ruled. Pricey but sturdy.

Anyone who goes to the trouble of buying me is bound for a college education and a middle-class life.