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Desperate teachers are turning to wish lists to get school supplies for class

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Thinkstock

Being a school teacher is a rewarding career that offers its share of pros and cons. The advantages are obvious: summers off, good benefits, job security, and taking on the rewarding challenge of helping shape the leaders of tomorrow. The downside, although less obvious to some, is definitely there to: late nights of grading papers, running extra-curricular activities, balancing the demands of both parents and students, and spending money out of your own pocket just to provide your students with necessary school supplies.

While a career in education poses both its glamourous and gloomy side, at least one group of teachers has decided to get creative and use Amazon's wish list feature to request donations of much needed school supplies from the public.


Creating a wish list allows one to not only bookmark the items they need and like, but also to post little notes and reminders next to the items, which these teachers have used to explain why they need pens, pencils, Post-It notes, colour-coded folders, headphones, educational DVD's and more.

The whole concept is a handy little idea started by a blogger that now includes lists from 38 different teachers. Many are in the market for a lot of the basic yet essential learning tools we all know and love, but some of the items don't exactly spring off of the top of one's head. Like this keyboard mallet. Or this collection of 300 Star Wars stickers (how many little Star Wars nerds in one classroom could there possibly be?).

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Thinkstock

All quirky items aside, you know something is wrong in the world when teachers are putting together wish lists that consist of the most basic supplies that every classroom should be guaranteed.

Like a plain black bucket (come on, couldn't the school janitor just hook a teacher up?!), or the basics listed by this teacher (including pencils, glue, paper and crayons). Seriously, some of these items are absolute no-brainers these teachers shouldn’t really have to go to Amazon for.

Contents of wish lists aside, there is a bigger issue at play when it comes to teachers providing what their students need for learning, and that's the fact that our educators are seemingly always having to go on strike, or at least threaten to do so, just to fight for the same things year after year.

It's an all too common occurrence that could in fact rear its ugly head again in September, when the 50,000 members of the Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association may find themselves instructing students under strict work-to-rule policies that call for not organizing school trips, not spending extra time with students, and not planning extra-curricular activities until the government sits down at the bargaining table with the OCETA and its three fellow teachers unions to discuss a new contract.

Wages and classroom sizes are the two main reasons for the dispute, with Education Minister Liz Sandals making it clear that there is no room in the budget to increase teacher salaries this time around.

As for the classroom sizes. The government wants to lift the cap on the number of students that can be assigned to one class, meaning that teachers would have to cater to the needs of even more children in the future.

And that also means the list of teachers posting their Amazon wish lists online for the world to see may indeed start to grow, even if just for the sake of hooking up a well deserving student with a copious amount of Star Wars-themed stickers for a job well done.