Pencil Cases

I'm not sure if this is a Korean thing, or if pencil cases have become all the rage all over the world for kids, but man, I hate pencil cases.

When I was a kid, I brought one pencil and one pen to school, or maybe two pens when I was older. And I don't think I ever needed any more than that, and I didn't lose my writing utensils, either, that I can recall. I've never been very losey.

But these kids haul around boxes and bags full of twenty pencils and eight pens and five erasers and four markers and three mechanical pencils (which they call "sharps," which I also hate--both the word and the item). And they play, play, play with them. It's a ridiculous rule to have that involves kids putting away that which holds their learning tools, but there you have it.

Pencil cases here look more like tackle boxes. They have multiple levels and compartments, braces to hold the pencils in place, combination locks on the outside to keep those nasty pencil thieves away, and many of them have a dry erase board on the inside of the top (WITH eraser) so the kids can draw on it during class. My Avenues Level C class' previous incarnation used to write "Alian Piglet," which is what they like to call me, on their little white boards.

Additionally, a lot of the pencil cases have wheels on them, so they can drive them around their desks. Some of them have the kind of wheels that you can wind up by pulling the case backwards and release like a race car. Awesome.