The element of quality (written in May of 2014)

Today, I found myself sorting out markers.  As a classroom teacher, it's one of those periodic activities that you do at the beginning or the end of the school year with the old batch of markers.  This year, I decided to do it with two different batches of marking pens.  One was purchased within the last two years and is probably the best known art supply company for kids, while the other batch is an odd collection of markers that was purchased by myself and a sweet friend who added a batch to mine that she had had in storage.  (And is probably memorable to most people as those sweet scented markers that you got to use in art class!) I'm not sure how old the oldest markers are in that batch but I believe that the vast majority of the markers are 15 years old at minimum.    Some of these might actually might be from my years at Grove City College!

They have been actively used so with several groups of children, but also have had several periods of general storage.  So it was very interesting to note the difference between the different brands of markers.  The older batch has been used intermittently within my classroom for heavy duty coloring projects, while the new group was a set that had regular use for brief periods of my day, not necessarily heavy usage, but regular enough.  I started the project, because I had noticed that the newer batch seemed to have a significant number of markers that were quite frankly out of ink.  So I started sorting.  I threw out about 80% of the markers.  (I wasn't surprised, because over the years, I have found that brand is not particularly well filled with ink, and even with the lids in place they dry out quite fast.  In fact, I have probably been given an equal number of markers from this company, but they never last longer than a year or two even if they are stored properly.

So I started the second batch thinking that I probably would find some that were out of ink.  After all they are quite old, and have been used with regular frequency, so it might surprise you to find that  I found exactly one.  Seriously!  I noticed some variations on ink color that might be age related discoloration but all of the rest did work, and the ones with odd shades were still filled with ink, and the color difference just adds a little variety.  It was the quality that made a difference.