Back-to-School Shopping List for the End-of-Times Academic Year

Welcome back, students and parents, for another, possibly the last, functioning school year!

Both the literacy crisis and moral deterioration of our leaders pretty much guarantee our school will be shuttered soon. But in the meantime, we hope to have a well-rounded, fun year interrupted by only one or two major geopolitical crises.

Even in the most unpredictable times, you can count on the fact that teachers are paid dogshit wages. So here’s a list of school supplies I kindly ask you to buy in advance to help get us through the year:

• *Two packs of no. 2 pencils. Ticonderoga is preferred. We focus-grouped this during an unpaid professional development session this summer in which we simulated the inevitable loss of power once the revolution begins. Ticonderoga proved more reliable to use as kindling than Dixon.
• One ballpoint pen that will likely be used to graffiti penises onto desks. After the nuclear winter, our species’ descendants will study this as the cave art of yore.
• One marbled composition book. We expect you to take notes on the day’s lessons, but realistically, you’ll be drawing penises in it too. If you would like your penis art to be preserved alongside the desk dicks, marbled composition is more durable. If you don’t care about the eternal glory of legacy, you can get the spiral-bound notebook for five cents cheaper at Target.
• Your computer and a charger on which you’ll be completing all of your assignments alongside your government-assigned AI bot named Tony. Tony will eventually take my job as teacher—maybe this semester, maybe next semester. Depends on how quickly they can reprogram the overstock of sex robots that were sent to the houses of our board of ed members for “research purposes.” Either way, the district requests that you be thoughtful in sharing as much of your work as you can with Tony so that he can absorb the curriculum.
• Two boxes of snacks to add to the class snack drawer. We’re requesting at least one peanut-free option for the first semester. By the second semester, it’s estimated that the peanut-allergy crowd will have succumbed to their evolutionary fate, so it won’t matter as much.
• The summer reading book. No need to read in advance. We will rip out the pages and use them to line the cage of our class hamsters, Pumpkin and Penelope. We anticipate that by March, after the nuclear winter has triggered a mass migration of displaced souls, we’ll run out of food in both the snack drawer and in the community at large. We may need to eat the pages and/or Pumpkin and Penelope.
• One case of bottled water. Please note: This is not drinking water. This water will be used only if Tony the Chatbot becomes sentient and begins to amass power. The district believes we can neutralize him by pouring water on the hard drive before he begins communicating with external servers and starts an uprising. For drinking water, please use the water fountain in Hallway C to fill your own Stanley cup, which you can buy from an ex-influencer in the breadline for the low price of fifty dollars (not adjusted for inflation).
• Two boxes of tissues (for communal use) which will dry the tears of the hopeful and the cynics alike.
• Two mini-packets of tissues (for personal use) in the event that you contract a previously eradicated childhood disease because your parent or guardian wanted to “do their own research."
• One box of dry-erase markers* because, as in the prior intellectual Dark Ages, nothing is permanent. Except the penis drawings.

Thank you for your contributions to our classroom. For all other inquiries about participation, policies, or general primitive survival, you can find me during office hours crying soundlessly and tastefully in my car while listening to Katy Perry’s 2010 hit record “California Gurls (Featuring Snoop Dogg)."

Sending thoughts and prayers in advance,
Mrs. H