Having Lead in Your Pencil
Of course you recognize this from the baby boomer at The Junk Drawer.
I wonder how young you can be and not recognize this? is this another bygone of the Baby Boomer era? Do they still have pencil sharpeners in schools? (BTW: it’s a picture of the blades of a pencil sharpener.) If they do have pencil sharpeners are they electric or are they the crank kind?
If they do have the sharpeners do they have multiple holes like the one above? Baby Boomers will remember fat kindergarten pencils? Harumph, at least I’m not a bad parent and saddled my struggling child with a skinny pencil. 🙂
Obviously we have both been through kindergarten and we had both used those fat little pencils to learn to write – but for some reason when it came to teaching our daughter we had forgotten about them.
I hated emptying the pencil sharpener in school. It’s not the wood shavings that make such a mess, it’s the graphite lead that just. got. everywhere. Because you removed the body exposing the blades the black junk always got on my hands, and usually on my face – usually on my nose! Of course, I would walk around with a black smudge on my face like it was Ash Wednesday until the teacher would notice.
Preschoolers are getting Blackberries and the good Pastor Josh is forgetting about fat pencils.
My husband, the gear head, loves the concept of this gadget. My take? Getting my preschooler to write with a big fat pencil is hard enough. I can’t imagine him doing so on a teeny keyboard.
I think we have a pencil in the house – fat or otherwise. We have a whole crapload of pens – always two rooms away from the phone when needed. We have a crapload of pencils in the golf cart.
How’s that for a random post with no point? Where can I buy a blog sharpener?
!–adsense–>
@Catch Her In The Wry: HAR, I can just picture you in your Becky Thatcher outfit whittlin’
GoingLikeSixty…also wrote this…Leave It To Cleavage Meets MaHellYeah Jackson
You were lucky to have the fancy handcrank type. We were stuck with a blade in a plastic rectangle that we had to rotate on our own while the shavings fell on our desk. Of course we only got those sharpeners after they took away our knives we used to whittle the pencil ends.
Catch Her In the Wry…also wrote this…She was right.
@Kim: thanks for bringing me up to speed. Makes sense that very old schools still have them.
I never gave it a thought about colleges still having pencil sharpeners. That’s kinda weird.
GoingLikeSixty…also wrote this…Leave It To Cleavage Meets MaHellYeah Jackson
I always loved emptying the pencil sharpener. The mess never bothered me, but I did love seeing the massive accumulated bits of such a simple process.
At least up here, where many of our schools are 50 years old and barely upgraded or remodeled, there are lots of classrooms with these sharpeners still in them. However, a lot of my teach friends have electric sharpeners on their desks for students to use.
Actually, most of the rooms in the older (meaning less than 10 years old) buildings on campus at the local university also have crank pencil sharpeners in them still.
@Kathy: yeah, Sunday morning. Nothing else to do! 😉 Thanks for being my muse.
Wow! Fast follow-up post! Awesome. I didn’t remember that wheel thingy on the front. Mine only has one large hole. But seeing that picture reminded me of other styles.
Yeah, the lead. Gets everywhere. Even while futzing around with mine to take the pictures, I got stuff all over me, the table, the floor.
Great post! Brought back a lot of pencil memories 🙂
Kathy…also wrote this…The Day After: I Said What?