Whether you had the job for the day, the week or the entire year, classroom chores were what kept the education machine running from Kindergarten through middle school.  From emptying the pencil sharpener to handing out papers, kids were employed to do a number of different jobs.  And the list goes on.  Erasing the chalkboard... clapping the erasers... there was a seemingly endless litany of tasks the teacher could assign.  The often-messy jobs taught kids more than responsibility, they gave them a sense of how things work.  Emptying the pencil sharpener was never as easy as it looked. 

The indelible image of brick lined with eraser-shaped chalk puffs remains in the hearts and minds of anyone who attended elementary school.  The key to getting an eraser good and clean was to pound swiftly with intention, and to back away before the chalk ended up all over your face.  This could be done in a myriad of ways; knocking the side of the eraser hoping the chalk would just fall out onto the ground, dropping it repeatedly on the ground – or of course the disastrous attempts of sneaking the eraser into the bathroom to wash it off. Any child soon figured out that erasers… well, they don’t dry so fast.  Maybe the upside was that the culprit didn’t get that chore again for the rest of the year. 

Washing the chalkboard went best with just a bucket of warm water and a giant sponge.  Well, after all the chalk has been erased, of course.  Long strokes, dipping the sponge back in before going at it again worked best... most of the time.  If there was a lot of remnant dust, a second run would be required, but that one usually went more quickly.  Unlike the eraser, fortunately, the blackboard often dried with speed and ease, making this chore one of the more popular ones.

Handing out papers and assignments was simple and great, until you found out what a paper cut was.  This chore, however, was sometimes short lived, as kids soon figure out the “pass it back” and “pass it across" method of dispersing papers.  Even then, the perilous paper cut loomed as a possibility, making careful movement an essential for classroom safety. 

Knocking pencil shavings into a container or trash can took skill, intuition, creativity, and just a dash of luck.  At least half of the time, it landed on a shoe.  Or shirt.  Or the floor.  The trick was to, ironically, use a pencil to loosen the tightly-packed shredded bits of wood and graphite, carefully emptying the vessel over the trash.  It was a frequent weapon of choice against the beast known as the Pencil Sharpener (and also for pencil fighting, but that's another story.)

Throughout the years, throughout classrooms around the world, teachers have had different ways of assigning classroom chores.  Some randomly selected a student to act as the “Student of the Day” or “Teacher’s Pet.”  This entailed taking all the chores for the day.  Some classrooms rotated the kids between different tasks, while others prepared their students for the harsh, cold reality of life by having them apply for a “job opening.”  There were often enough tasks around the classroom to keep each child busy every single day.

As a kid, while we probably didn’t like every chore, it always felt nice to help.  To be needed.  To feel responsibility.  To feel accomplishment (even if it was for the tiniest thing).  Now, who wants to empty the electric pencil sharpener?