A banjo, a large-screen TV and an Anderson shelter: the ‘ridiculous’ items bought by teachers

A Twitter user challenged teachers to name the most ridiculous resources they had ever spent their own money on. The answers were a tribute to teachers’ inventiveness, generosity...and technological ineptitude
25th October 2017, 5:41pm

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A banjo, a large-screen TV and an Anderson shelter: the ‘ridiculous’ items bought by teachers

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/banjo-large-screen-tv-and-anderson-shelter-ridiculous-items-bought-teachers
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This autumn, Tes reported that the vast majority of teachers were having to pay for essential classroom supplies themselves because their schools lacked sufficient funds.

Today, teacher and Twitter user @MrEFinch asked the following question:

 

Teachers. What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever spent your own money on to take in to class?#Schoolcuts @NEUnion

- Ed Finch (@MrEFinch) 24 October 2017

 

 

And so, @MrEFinch began by offering up some ridiculous spending of his own:

 

Class set of web cams so we could do animation. We had the laptops but no money left for peripherals.

- Ed Finch (@MrEFinch) 24 October 2017

 

His technological investment was, however, immediately trumped by someone else’s offer:

 

a big screen TV so I could show videos and stuff in class. had to ask for it as an xmas pressie from family!

- Claire Seldon (@claireseldon_ed) 24 October 2017

 

However, if this teacher thought that the sacrifice of a Christmas gift would allow her to rest on her altruistic laurels, she was wrong. A big-screen TV, after all, is very well and generous, but it does not require the effort of, say, sourcing, purchasing and disassembling a genuine Second World War artefact.

 

An Anderson shelter, bought on ebay and dismantled by me in a garden in Barnsley where it was being used as a garden shed. 1/2

- Dan Johnson (@darthfarmer) 24 October 2017

Another teacher bought a second-hand sofa, explaining:

 

 

Well, my argument: as an adult I never sit at a desk to read. I sit on a sofa. So let’s see if it gets reluctant little readers to read too!

- Miss B (@MissBprimary) October 24, 2017

 

 

The bright side of spending one’s own money on classroom resources is, of course, the glow of self-sacrifice. Nothing quite equals the knowledge that one is, without a doubt, a superior human being. A superior human being capable of, surely, anything at all. Take, for example, this teacher, who spent his own money on…

 

a huge table top football contraption. It took ages to build and then I realised I’d attached half the players the wrong way round

- Andrew Moffat (@moffat_andrew) October 24, 2017

 

 

A number of responses (74 as this was being written) referred to items that one might expect to be covered by school budgets, namely paper, books, pens, pencils and glue sticks.

Unfortunately, some pupils were far from bowled over by their teacher’s generosity:

 

Tenor banjo (£245) to play on a Corrs song some children wanted to do for a concert. They said that they preferred it without.

- john of surrey (@johnofsurrey) 24 October 2017

 

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