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I want in on this conversation. This year, among other items, my son needed to bring in
- 8 glue sticks. 8! 8 glue sticks times 22 kids= 176 glue sticks. These all go into a communal bin. I ask you, do we really need 122 glues sticks? And what happens to the ones that aren’t used? I know we didn’t get half our supplies back last year and my son said the teacher still had bins full of stuff when the year ended.
- 2 boxes of tissues. Guys, though we’re not rich we live in an affluent area with “blue ribbon” schools. Our property taxes go to schools – while they’re astronomical, I also agree that you can’t put a price on a good education so I don’t complain. Much. With some members of the community paying $20,000 in property taxes alone (not me thank goodness) do you really mean to tell me the school board can’t spring for tissues? I told my son we’ll keep some in his backpack if he needs them.
- Large box of crayons. Again. I’ve been to the school. All the teachers have huge boxes of crayons. Can we not use them? Why do we need to keep adding to them year after year after year?
- 8 dry erase markers again times 22 kids.
When I was six we were expected to bring in notebooks and pencils. The schools had a supply closet. Low budget New York City schools even spring for crayons. What is up with these massive supply lists?
Plus, each week I’m being hit with a fundraiser. I hate opening the backpack because someone else will want money. The class moms wanted to know why I don’t contribute. I told them I do but I have to pick and choose, I can’t buy every tshirt or box of candy. They also wanted $30 per kid for the teachers gift. $30!!!! I declined and baked a loaf of bread. I mean it’s ridiculous.
@Deb – I agree. Years ago, when my kids started kindergarten each parent was given a list of items that they had to provide for the entire class. I remember with my daughter, I had crayons and construction paper. Construction paper was easy, I went to Costco and bought their huge stacks, but crayons – I had to buy 22 packs of crayons when realistically each table could have shared a pack or two. In elementary school all I needed were clothes, a backpack and a lunch box. Middle school I had to buy pens and notebooks, pencils were supplied by the school.
In high school, we had to have a scientific calculator, notebooks, pens, pencils and filler paper. Combination locks were supplied by the school, as were our text books. That’s another of my complaints this year. I had to purchase the books my son will be reading in English Class this first semester – I had To Kill A Mockingbird on hand, but I had to buy copies of Stranger in the House and All’s Quiet on the Western Front. I don’t know what the rest of the year’s reading list will be at this point.
Teacher’s gifts are now forbidden here. If a parent wants to buy the teacher a gift, it has to be something the entire classroom would use like an electric pencil sharpener, tissues, toilet paper, etc.
Oh, the dreaded fundraisers. I’ve always been curious if other school systems run them this way. Here, the PTA sends out the fundraiser information on the first day of school with the numerous forms I have to fill out for the next day. I’m not kidding either. My kids come home with the big catalogs (Kathryn Beichs I think is the company) with a letter stating that the child in each grade who sells the most will be rewarded with a limo ride and lunch at an area pizza restaurant with the principal of the school. The “winners” get to leave their classes at noon and then return at 1 p.m.
I’ve complained numerous times about this. My family is rather small. My husband’s parents are both deceased and his sister is like us and lives from paycheck to paycheck. I have my parents and two brothers. That’s it, so they never sell much. My husband is not allowed to bring fundraising material to his work like many parents do.
We stopped allowing them to sell years ago because my daughter especially was coming home in tears because her best friend’s parents went to their apartment complexes and allowed her to go door to door to sell to the residents there. First, I find that to be completely deplorable. Nothing like having your landlord’s kid hit you up for fundraising. Add in the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins that this family has and she easily sells over 300 items per year. No one’s beaten her sales record in the four years she’s lived in this town.
Deb and Ann — All those crayons etc, that is just wasteful! What do they do with all of them? It seems like in this “green” day and age, they would care about that. Oh and Deb, we used to have to bring tissues to school too. And the teachers never put them out. I’ve always had allergies, so my mom was always having to stuff my bag with kleenex in the morning before I would leave, and she’d ask what happened to all those tissues we brought to the school. Who knows… Ann, I feel sorry for your kids with the bus situation. I was lucky to live across the street from my elementary school, but in junior high and high school I walked because bus service was only provided to kids who lived more than three miles away. I was like 2.7 miles away. I wonder what the parents who don’t work at home do to pick up their kids? 3:02 made me laugh though.
@Amy – I actually spent one year working as a parent/teacher assistant for my daughter’s kindergarten class. I’d never seen trash pile up so quickly. At that age, they had a perfect opportunity to teach kids about recycling, but instead kids were told to throw out broken crayons. They used paper towels like they were water. The teacher seriously had the kids using one paper towel per hand every time they washed their hands. The classroom had tile floors and when they raised chicks, they put down five layers of newspaper when they let the chicks roam free every day. Chicken poop isn’t going to hurt a tile floor and it would have been much easier IMO to wash the floor after the chicks were put back in their heated tank.
As the year progressed, I got to know the teachers pretty well and asked why they didn’t focus on recycling. The response was really sad, “At that age, they just aren’t ready to understand it.”
They finally started teaching my daughter about recycling this year. She was in the 5th grade!!
So if you have children in elementary school, it definitely pays to explain the recycling process to them because not every school is teaching it.
Ann — I’m paranoid about the idea of kids handling chickens, because I have worked for food poisoning lawyers enough to know that handling chicken poop can give kids salmonella. That school could be sued. Kids with salmonella is nothing to mess with. But aside from that tangent (sorry) it is a shame that the schools would wait until 5th grade to start teaching recycling. One of my nieces in preschool was already taught to tell anyone in our household who threw paper in the trash that it should be recycled. She was like the recycle monitor. LOL I’m going to have to ask about the crayons now. That is killing me… Picturing bins of thousands of unused crayons.