look before you lend

One danger of being a sub teacher is having to use what is available to you. You go into a room blind, not knowing how well equiped it is or whether you are going to have to spend twenty minutes searching cupboards for pritt stick or felt tips.
Of course you could always carry an emergency pack containing enough rulers, pencils, pens, erasers, set squares, sellotape, tipp ex, pencil sharpeners, compasses, protractors, exercise books, calculators, dictionaries, scissors, glue sticks, staplers, colouring pencils for thirty pupils... but sometimes I don't get up early enough to pack a transit van full of stationery. I make do with what I can - I am the Ray Mears of the classroom.

But sometimes it goes wrong.

Just now a pupil asked to borrow a pen. I was in the middle of helping a year 11 with imagination deficit disorder so I absent mindedly grabbed a pen from the teacher's desk and gave it to him.
At the end of a lesson punctuated with various giggling fits from around the room the pupil returned the pen with a look that can only be described as extreme pity...