Tag: papers

KonMari for the Classroom: Paper – Day One

KMClassroomPaperSo, you’ve created your vision and are ready to tackle your classroom clutter – good for you! I’m convinced that even if you get no further than discarding extraneous paper in your classroom, you will have made a huge dent. That’s because so much of what we have in our rooms falls into this category.  I’m not even going to address what is in your file cabinets in this post – that’s a whole other ball of wax -I’m just focused on the paper you can see. So for now when I say “paper”, this is what I am talking about:

Paper

  • notebook paper
  • notebooks
  • newsprint
  • construction/manila/fadeless paper
  • notepads and sticky-notes
  • blank copy paper
  • chart tablets and chart paper

Decorative and Informational

  • posters
  • anchor charts
  • bulletin board border
  • bulletin board displays

Books

  • old textbooks
  • testing practice aids
  • professional books
  • books in your classroom library
  • binders from various conferences, workshops, and training events

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it should get you started.

Plain Paper

Let’s start with plain old paper first.  Gather it up from all of its various locations – storage cabinets, shelves, your desk – wherever you have it stashed, and bring it all to one central spot in your classroom.  This will make it much easier to see how much paper you have amassed, and it will make it easier to sort into a manageable amount.

I’m going to suggest getting rid of all loose paper – if it’s in a package, great; if not, it’s out of here.  Unless you have trays to hold the loose paper, it gets torn, folded, and creased.  Send to the recycle bin. Now – if you have a neat stack of 200 sheets of notebook paper, I am not suggesting you get rid of it – that would be wasteful.  But random sheets, cheap construction paper that tears easily once out of the package, newsprint with torn edges – those are the things that should go. Keep clean notebooks that have never been used. Notepads and sticky-notes that have only a  few sheets left on them – recycle. You want to whittle this down until you are left with neat stacks of various papers, clean notebooks, usable notepads, and charts.

Look at what’s left – what do you have too much of?  Construction paper because it’s on the school supply list every year?  Sticky-notes because you can only order them in packages of 10?  Reduce those piles by at least half, more if you can honestly say you will not use up what’s left in the foreseeable future. Take your discards and set them by your classroom door so you remember that they are on their way out!

Teaching Aids and Informational Display Items

We typically find two different things on our classroom walls and bulletin boards – teaching aids and decorative items.  We’re going to tackle the educational ones first. Locate all of your informational display items (posters, anchor charts, etc.) and, just like with the plain paper, bring them all to one spot in your classroom.  Are there any that are out-of-date? (Solar system posters that include Pluto as a planet, for example.)  If the information on a teaching aid is no longer valid, it needs to go.  Are there any posters or charts that are not applicable to your current teaching assignment? Set those aside in a different pile.  Torn or faded? Corners so chewed up by years of stapling they won’t even hold a staple anymore?  If you can afford to replace them, then recycle the damaged ones.  If you can’t replace them, then make the best repairs you can (trim off the torn corners and laminate for added durability?), and place in your “keep” pile. If you have more than one poster or chart representing the same information, do you need to keep them both? Would you hang up both at the same time? If not, choose one to part with.

Continue this process until you are left with the best of the best of the teaching aids, anchor charts, and educational posters. These are the items that, even though you have to have them, fit the vision you created for your classroom.  All the items that are damaged beyond repair or out-of-date go to the recycle bin.  The duplicate items you just sorted through can be given to another teacher who might be able to use them, so set those by your classroom door since they are on their way out.  The items that are no longer useful for your current teaching assignment?  That’s a judgment call.  If you don’t want to get rid of them (a lot of money invested and you might end up back in that grade level), then it is fine to hang on to them.  If classroom storage is an issue, I would take them home.  But if you are okay parting with them permanently, then set them by the door as well.

On Their Way Out

If you are really committed to this, that pile by the door should be pretty sizable!  These are all items that are in perfectly good condition and could easily be used by someone else. What you do with those items may depend on your school building. At mine, we used to just set things we no longer wanted in our work room or lounge, or even in the hallway for others to take. You know what they say, one man’s trash… Whatever you do, it’s important that you get them out of your room so you are not tempted to keep any of it.

I’m going to stop here for brevity’s sake, and because I’m not sure you could get through more than this in one day anyway.  Next up will be books and the papers we use to make our classrooms pretty.

Books & Paper

Starting with clothing, which ends up being relatively easy in my opinion, you think that the next categories will go just as smoothly – ha!  Books and paper come next.  I think it is safe to say that we are all drowning under the weight of the amount of paper we have in our homes. Computers were supposed to take care of paper; everything is stored electronically so there should be no need for the paper copy.  That might be true if you are a millennial, a digital native.  But for the rest of us, that little voice that says you should have a hard copy “just in case” (along with an inherent distrust of computers), means there probably hasn’t been a serious amount of paper reduction in the home.

I consider myself a digital immigrant.  I bank and shop online and am confident enough in my financial institutions that I no longer have statements mailed to my home.  But each day when I go to my mailbox, I am reminded of that Seinfeld episode – you know the one – when Kramer tried to stop the mail, specifically junk and catalogs, from being delivered. I may be doing everything else online, but the places we shop and bank still get us with offers and catalogs that just keep coming.  (They must be in cahoots with the postal service.)  And straight to the recycle bin they go.

But beyond the daily paper items that come in and go out pretty quickly, Kondo addresses those items that we all hang onto because we think we must.  Her philosophy is discard everything; anything of importance can be found again electronically.  And while that may be true, I think we all realize (and she does too) there are some things that you just can’t throw away (marriage licenses, passports, etc.) So I went through the file cabinet, ditched what I knew for sure was not needed and kept only those things that I knew I had to.  And while I still have the file cabinet with my categorized hanging file folders (gold/green, concrete-sequential, remember?), I was able to reduce down from two drawers to one.  That was good enough for me.

There may not be a lot (or any) joy in the necessary paper of our lives, but books…well, that is a different story.  My husband, my daughter, and I are all voracious readers; we have a lot of books in our home. To do this the KonMari way, you would unload all of your books onto the floor much like the clothes, and go through them one by one.  Well, I am here to tell you that was not going to happen.  First of all, not all of the books are mine, and I have been the only one KonMari-ing my house at this point. Secondly, I could see them all much better on the shelves.  It’s not like we had books spilling out all over our house, so I was content to keep them as they were.  But later on, KonMari once again made sense in hind-sight.

To put out certain Christmas decorations, we always clear off about six bookshelves in our living room.  The books get boxed away for a month and put back out when Christmas is over.  As I was taking them off the shelf this year, however, I came across some that really didn’t speak to me.  So those went into a separate box to be sold/donated.  Had it not been necessary to remove them from the shelves in the first place, they would have remained indefinitely. So if you get to the section on books and think to yourself, “I can just sort by sight,” you are wrong.  While you might not want to empty every shelf at once, I think emptying one or two at a time and going through the books by hand will make a huge impact on what you choose to keep.  Those books that have real meaning for you will be the ones that remain.