Last weekend we had our usual Friday night pizza with my parents. That’s what happens when you get married and have a kid - all normal socializing turns into family time. During dinner my mom informed us she had a million dollar idea! Great, we’re all ears. She subs in elementary schools and has encountered numerous problems with cheaply made pencils that won’t sharpen. And…? Her idea was if we could come up a cheap environmentally friendly material to make pencils out of that didn’t get eaten up by school manual pencil sharpeners we would make millions.

I think she went on for about 15 minutes about this idea. My husband chuckled as he suggested the school use electric pencil sharpeners. My brother smiled as he mentioned that they make these things call pens now, some come with erasers. As for me, I didn’t think this was a “new” problem in schools. I remember grinding the wood off pencils in search of that perfect lead point in school. Most of the time I’d break the tip of my pencil off on purpose. It was a great excuse to need to get up and walk around the class. I also remember these stupid pencils where the lead was in a white tip and you would take one off as it got dull and shove it back through the end of the plastic pencil. Then the next tip would come out. How odd? I’m sure teachers really loved the inventor of those. If you lost one of the white lead tips, you were screwed because the pencil wouldn’t work.

Hey mom, that pencil you’re looking for is called a “mechanical pencil.” Plastic is cheap and they are refillable. Somebody already had that million dollar idea.