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Submitted by Mel
Epic love letters and gossip notes were just a few of the creations made possible by Gel Pens. Does anyone else have memories of getting in trouble for using these on papers, exams, etc.? Or getting them taken away for arguing over who gets to use them?
Some of us kept using them as we got older and the results are beautiful:
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I bought the cheap ones that ran out of ink after the first two days.
these where so awesome, but now you can only find them at Sam’s Club and scrapbook stores
We painted our hands with these pens.
The most strange creations came up during boring classes……
One of my friends had silver, blue, and pink flower designs covering her entire forearms after one of our 9th grade English classes, lol. I liked using a combination of neon ones and dark ones to make geometrical designs with my handy stencil.
I live by gel pens. I use black ones instead of pen & ink for artwork. I’ve illustrated a book using gel pens, the cross-hatching turns out nearly the same (pens still can manage finer lines, but one small imperfection in the paper and you’ve got ink all over the page, not a problem with gel pens). Also, I have cats, and pots of ink and cats and important projects just don’t mix.
To this day, I still do not understand why teachers banned the use of these pens. I can understand why they didn’t like lime green or yellow or other light colors. That is hard to read. But what was the problem with gel pens in general? Maybe they should have been happy the kid did the work at all rather than gripe about what sort of pen got used.
Personally, I liked gel pens because their was less drag on the paper and they made writing easier.
They were banned because creativity is wrong. Children are supposed to become uncreative so that they can turn into the robotic adults of today.
ouch! Ours were never banned. I’m guessing they were all banned because it’s easier and creates fewer arguments to do a blanket ban than to say specific colors only. When you leave room for argument, it can waste instructional time, and there are plenty of other pens that work just fine in classrooms. At least, that’s my guess for why schools would ban them.
For me, it was really easy to write test answers on my hands then quickly get rid of incriminating evidence… Ball point pens don’t wash off so easily
Good points on the wasting instructional time and usability for cheating (though I never would have thought of that). The biggest detractor from classroom time though, would be trying to regain the attention of a student who decided gel pens were more worthy of attention than the lesson at hand. My teachers let me draw with them no problem as I was actually able to remember their lesson word for word without looking up more than once every ten minutes to take down an important word or phrase. Although I was always great at school and sorely lacking everywhere else, unlike most people.
Haha, I was one of those kids, too. I got away with a lot more than the other students, especially in science classes, because I always got the best grade (almost exclusively A’s, often 100’s) of anyone else in the class. A friend of mine who also did excellent in chemistry, she and I would whisper to each other during lessons, trade notes, et cetera, and we never got in trouble for it because we were like the only people passing the class. I think there was one day where we were watching an instruction video, that we actually played tic-tac-toe and hangman all period. XD
Gel pens were banned by my principal because once you wrote on yourself, they would leak into your bloodstream and kill you.
My principal was a dumbass.
Wow. You would have thought that 90% of the population of teenybopper girls suddenly dying of gel-poisoning would have made national headlines!
He clearly thought this one out.
Do you guys remember the ones that smelled? there was like popcorn, chocolate, cola, strawberry etc. I only remember gel pens from when we used to draw on our hands to make different flavours
Sadly they didn’t taste like pop corn ect.
Yeh I was five
Yeah, that other person is right. I got a huge pack of them, and then never used them because they were banned at school. So the pack sat untouched at home, then the plastic broke and many pens were lost.
How wonderful it felt to write class notes in bright orange, green and yellow.
Until it came to revision times and none of the notes were of any use… I blame those pens for my terrible marks in certain classes!
I found coloured notes helpful actually, still do. They help me split up infomation.
I still use them
.For letters,cards,everything…And the funny thnig is I found them now on my adult years,didn’t have them in in my childhood..
My teacher gave my entire 6th grade class a set of these for graduation.
With me, I always use them to draw on my hands,
Most of those drawings look like they were made by Milky Pens. I think those might have been the predecessors to gel pens. I had a huge set of Milky Pens and a black notebook to write in.
Holy crap, I remember when the cool girls of my class (a class of 15 at the time) would get them and I begged my mother to buy them for me. She got hooked on them and the fad died…I still buy the black ones though of drawing.
for those of you who still use gel pens for art, have you seen glaze pens by sakura? they’re gel pens that raise up after the ink is dry. i use them when i don’t feel like busting out all my embossing equipment.
Those sound AWESOME. Thanks for the tip; I have gotta check that out!
I remember a few times when I only had a yellow or silver pen in my backpack, and then I had to hope that I wouldn’t need to turn in any classwork that day. I remember having black and dark blue paper to draw on, but of course I couldn’t do school work on that.
i only remember them not working very well and having to store them cap-down…and some of them would only show up on black paper
the scented pens were cool,
fluro green was apple… didnt taste like apple.
i got a pack of 30 gel pens a few months ago, i coloured in my cars logo on my steering wheel…. my mum wasnt amused
i remember in 5th grade there was this kid matthew who would con me into taking gel pens from this girl amy’s desk. i don’t remember if we shared the profits, but i do recall his trying to broaden his collection by pilfering mine. oh, karma. claims me, but no other in this senario
Gel pens were like gold at my school.
We had a small 50c vending machine inside our school and the school must have made a lot of money off those things.
I would always take my saved quarters to school so i could get a bunch.
Ah, the good ol’ days..
My teachers banned them just because they were so impossible to read…girls would right in like bright yellow, it was hilarious. I never got into it though, just because I would go through about 4 pens on a single page of paper, they ran out so quickly. x_x
I did not enjoy gel pens, they get everywhere on left handed people like me.
I had a giant box of these things… I brought it with me to school and about 10 of them got stolen. I was PISSED. I was in 5th grade… my teachers held the class in for lunch until someone confessed. no one did, and I never got them back. I bet it was Aaron Guzman…. -_-+
I remember these were very popular when I was in 6th grade. My friends and I would write something on the palms of each others hands (9 times out of 10 it would be something completely silly) and then on the top of our hands we would draw a little circle and underneath it write “PUSH”. We’d then turn to our other friends who weren’t in on our little secret and have them “Push” our hand to open up the letter…really corny, I know but it wasted a lot of time.
I also remember when they had the black paper that was specifically for the pens. That was the greatest thing ever! I had a notebook filled with that paper!
Those things are still win! My huband’s various jobs have had him working in sub zero and very humid environments. Those (the black ones) were the only ones that worked.
I used to have the scented ones, and a really good set of sparkly ones, in all different colours. I loved my gel pens SO MUCH.