Day 26: Duplicates

(Not my school filing cabinet, but a similar mess of papers)

I realized today, bored to tears as my students silently trudged through their practice LEAP tests, that this lenten purging doesn't have to be limited to home.  According to the graphing calculator I did keep, I spend about 42% of my waking hours each week at work.  While I don't expect to spend 42% of Lent giving away things from work (the school might not like that), it seems only fair to dedicate at least one day to clearing out my classroom's main offender: the filing cabinet.

When I started teaching at Lusher, I took the position and classroom of a man that had just retired.  For those of you who are not teachers, what that means is that I inherited all of his crap.  Now, it could have been a lot worse--I was lucky enough to have a couple of teachers and administrators give it a first go-through before I got there.  Nonetheless, it was overwhelming.  I came in to find the room in disarray with piles of worksheets, lesson plans, and random notes about things like circumference (which I don't even teach) on every available surface.  I somehow managed to get things in a decent enough order that I didn't go into some kind of claustrophobic shock, but I do not lie when I say that I was still throwing out the man's papers at the end of the year.

That being said, three years later, I find my desk and filing cabinets in a position of similar disarray: papers and binders covering the available surfaces, files so atrociously full that I can't get to the ones in the back without the taking out the ones in the front first.  So, as my students prepared for state testing today, I opened up a drawer and started weeding.  Two hours later, I had only managed to successfully rid myself of duplicates and outdated copies of tests and quizzes from most of my fourth grade math files.  While that is one large step for Olinde-kind, it's a real small step in the scheme of things and means that next week, when I am not sitting for hours on end watching students bubble in answer sheets, I'll have to tackle the rest of those papers.  Recycling group, get ready for a workout.