It's real.
It wants to kill me.
Method? Drowning. You thought I was gonna say paper cuts, didn't you.
I sit here staring at eight stacks of English on my larger-than-average coffee table, eight stacks created from boxes of random papers. There's a pile of history papers on the floor that is particularly bugging me because I optimistically and mistakenly believed I had filed every last one of them. The history papers only seem spiteful, not scary, since they are easily put into binders that I spent a week organizing*.
But those eight stacks?? EIGHT?? There could've been more, but I collapsed some units together:
1) launching the course/benchmarks/book lists
2) narrative/lit analysis
3) persuasive/research/nonfiction
4) novels/bios
5) grammar/vocabulary
6) Holocaust/civil rights accessories
7) cool ideas/wonderful images/no idea where to file this thing
8) poetry
Now, each stack (average height=four inches) needs to be put in order. Sometimes looking at all this paper makes me wanna grab a flamethrower to get rid of these, quit my job, and go hug trees to make up for things. But I can't--I like my coffee table too much.
Imagine my delight in finding this post from Angela Watson's awesome thecornerstoneforteachers.com blog: a great resource for planning my future taming of the Paper Monster! It's of no immediate help for the stacks I'm confronting; I still have days of decision making and sorting. But ah, these stacks are the result of a lack of systems to deal with the tsunami of paper that overwhelms me daily in the classroom; Angela's categories will help me win against my relentless enemy. God bless her!
*To the left is Round One of the epic Lola vs the Paper Monster, 2010. (I won this one.) Round Two is in effect right now, and I am too lazy to take a pic of the heavily laden larger-than-average coffee table.
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