I am in the midst of filling the garbage and recycling with binders and folders filled with my writing stuff from teaching at Gustavus. I parted with all but what I deemed potentially useful in June when I cleaned my office, but still brought home dozens of binders and folders. I am only keeping a few things, and those only until I decide they need to go, too. I have no intention of doing any more work with groups of teachers or college students, and so like my friend and writing partner Teresa did a few years ago, I decided to say goodbye to the physical remains of the work I did on the road with Teresa, and in the classroom at Gustavus.
I thought about saving a paper copy of everything I have on transparencies, but if I were to do any teaching or workshops again, all of it would need to be recreated in power point anyway, so no reason to keep anything. And soon, no reason to keep anything electronic, either. I transferred a lot of files to an external hard drive last spring, and am only keeping teaching files on my computer that I might need to send to students this year while the ones I still know are student teaching.
I don't even feel bad about getting rid of the stuff. Spending Wednesday with my brothers in Spring Valley sorting and reminiscing our way through Grandpa Charlie's house prompted me to get rid of my former work life. While going through binders and folders this afternoon, I felt sadness about what I'm seeing in many classrooms-- kids doing worksheets and teachers "covering curriculum". One of my student teachers lamented last week that she had to do several worksheets each day from the purchased literacy curriculum or else she would get behind. SHE would get behind... Well, keep on going honey, and drag those kids right along with you. Make sure they can read isolated lists of words and fill nouns and verbs in blank spaces, and then you can complain when they don't read with enthusiasm or write well when given the rare chance to write something that is meaningful to them. Grumble, grumble. They're just words, anyway.
1 comment:
Oh, Jill. It was a sad, but liberating task to throw all that stuff away. You and I can get together over coffee and laugh at the newest picture books instead of teaching groups of people things they really don't want to know. We had a great time...and now we're done.
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