[catpuppy]

... teacher Martine Korach has spent hundreds of dollars buying mica, sulfur and quartz mineral samples as well as feeding and taking care of a leopard gecko, a corn snake and other classroom pets. In the end, those and other classroom expenses totaled nearly $3,000 a year, she said.

HELPFUL HINT TO MARTINE: For $3,000 one can buy more mica, quartz and sulfur as well as gecko and snake food than it is possible to consume in a year. Shop elsewhere. Better yet, stop spending your own money and start teaching your students. I can guarantee that when public education did a better job of educating, teachers spent little if anything on such things.

[DoughtyOne]

Just how much supplies does it take to teach reading, english, math, geography and history? As for the sciences, perhaps a little extra is needed, but it's my contention that these fools waste more money than you and I could ever imagine.

In California, in some cases we spend over 1/3rd of the education budget in k-12 on the children of illegal immigrants. Funny how I don't hear teachers lamenting that.