As you probably know, I've only gone through a single semester in the past twenty five years, but this upcoming term will be the first in which both myself and my two children are in session at the same time. My oldest has started high school, my youngest is just one year behind her, in eighth grade. So now, for the first time, we'll both be in class at the same time.

Both of my children started back to school this past Thursday after a really great summer break. Once they had reported to class on the first day, they were each given a long list of supplies that we are required to purchase for them. Both lists were very extensive, and since they need the supplies for their classes on Monday, today was deemed "supply shopping day". We had to shop at several stores, at the end of our shopping trip we totalled up our sales slips and quickly determined that we had spent almost $150 on supply costs. That's $75 per child for this semester.

We bought filler paper, various colored highlighters, compasses, protractors, folders, three ring binders, dividers, book covers, correction fluid, pens, graph paper, colored pencils, mechanical pencils, erasers, pencil sharpeners, rulers, and much more.

Which got me thinking...

One of the additional benefits of attending classes in the "virtual classroom" is one that I hadn't really thought of until today, and that is the fact that there is very little in the way of supplies that one must purchase for distance learning purposes. There's tuition, books, and perhaps an item or two, but nothing approaching the massive pile of supplies we had to buy for my teenagers.

Even when taking notes, I've taken them electronically and stored them in text files on my hard drive. Avoiding the need for supplies that have to be consumed saves not only money for the student, but even helps to save the environment...