Wish Lists, and The Parents Who Neglect Them

As we know, schools are evil, and they raise money by encouraging children to buy books, and all kinds of other things. In our case, the school is pushing Scholastic Books publications, and they make it ...easier for parents to order them by sending the children home with a half-sized sheet of paper entitled "Student Wish List," where the wishful child is encouraged to write the books that they would like their parents to purchase for them. To make the evil complete, the child is required to return the wish list tomorrow morning, with or without a purchase. So if your parents are too cheap to buy you The Adventures of Lieutenant Wacko, let's say, you still have to bring in an empty "wish-list" to reflect the vacuum where your dreams could have been, if only things were different.

It goes without saying that Ian's Wish List item was a Pokemon book. But why only one? The explanation is quite unastonishing:

"I was gonna get as many books as I could fit on my Wish List, but Mommy said she wouldn't pay for twenty."

I went upstairs to get Ian eight dollars - yes, I was going to squander an extra penny on a $7.99 book - but when I came back downstairs, I found Ian bending over a small canning jar filled mostly with coins, drawing on his own treasury to glean funds for the purchase. He counted out the dollars "five, six, seven-... and now I just need ninety-nine cents," and proceeded to count out precisely 99 cents, probably in some hodge-podge combination of random coins.

Maybe the school is doing this to teach them math...

(October 27, 2011)