File cabinets, piles, and desk drawers: Oh my!

Today, I undertook the task I've been avoiding all week, and, to be honest, all summer (I had my keys... I could have been working on it bit by bit on weekends... ). And what task is that? The Great Filing Cabinet and Pile Cleanout of 2010.

I am not by nature an organized person. Well, maybe that's not true. I have organized the daylights out of my office at home, and am good with things like bookshelves and DVD shelves and similar such things that are fairly low traffic and able to be organized. But when it comes to files and papers and curriculum materials I amass at a rate that is unfathomable to me, I am a complete disaster. As Jack McFarland would say, "D. I. Saster." And in the four years I've been at Poway, it hasn't really helped much that I've been either in deer-in-headlights-new-prep mode, or tweak-it-until-its-right mode, and so I haven't really been taking the time or making the effort to create and enforce an organizational strategy that works for me. Plus, and though this is certainly a lazy person's excuse, it was a very real reason for why I remained until today a criminally negligent filer: my one good filing cabinet (well, and the other two crummy ones) are all in the back corners of the room, blocked fairly effectively by student desks. So when most of my work goes on at my front tables and my desk, which is in the front of the room, I rarely take the time to simply place my instructional materials into a neatly labeled file in a drawer. But towards the very end of the year last year, I basically bit the bullet and heaved my good filing cabinet back behind my desk in the front corner of the room. I am hoping with every well-intentioned fiber of my being that this move will keep me better organized.

Flash forward to today: the *actual* cleanout. [Now, I did do a huge clean out three summers ago when I taught summer school, but that was in many ways simply an aesthetic cleanout. Throwing away multiple copies, ditching things for curricula I don't teach any more, tossing out old student work that is just plain silly to keep. I think it was about ten boxes of recycling. Then this year, during some of the standardizing testing lulls and AP testing doldrums, I started to think carefully about how best to approach my filing. I did some more cleaning out, got my class sets of things (particularly exams and benchmarks) organized, and labeled piles for a second go through.

But today. Today was glorious. I left feeling so exhilarated, which is so dweeby and silly, but I am so, so excited that I am *thisclose* to being completely organized. I started today by sitting down at a student desk (away from the distraction of my computer) and thought carefully about what kinds of folders I would need for APEL. I decided on them, neatly wrote the labels, and labeled all of my hanging folders. I removed everything from the drawer I wanted to appoint as my APEL drawer, installed the folders, and started sorting. Some of the folders are empty, but I KNOW that there will be other things to add; basically what I have discovered I have done is created parking spaces for things I accumulate this year.