Clutter

Here's another great post about clutter with reference to a great book to help with the problem. Same book mentioned numerous times by Merlin. This one from Dan Blank (via Elizabeth). Made me go through and delete some stale tags and tighten up the blogroll.

I've thought a lot about clutter as it relates to my classroom and home, but not the blog. Interesting perspective. What are some of your favorite minimalist blog layouts? When is it too minimalist?

(photo by Maureen Sill)

What's Working?

We're on Spring Break and whether you're on yours, it just ended, or it's coming up this is a good time to reflect on the year so far. What's been working? What triumphs, no matter how small, have you had this year with your students/classes? I took some of my students on their first trip to the brand new local library. I got my fourth graders, who had been complaining that reading is boring, begging me to keep reading an exciting series I got them hooked on (I'll blog about it when we're finished).

I've gotten a bit more organized and had a lot less stuff fall through the cracks this year. For me, that's a big deal. Part of that was trying to keep my desk cleaned off and make more use of my inbox (and trying to keep that cleared out as well).

Now to try to keep the momentum going and end on a good note with my students. This is one of the hardest times of the year for me. We have two weeks of mind-numbing standardized testing: the anti-teaching. I get discouraged but it also tends to make me react by getting looser and more creative the last few weeks of school. This is usually the time I have the kids start working on poetry and going outside more. We do a lot of haiku and free verse and publish and share a collection these last couple weeks.

What about you?

Box Hero, Box Hack

Box Hero

It cracks me up to get credit just for saying I'm going to do what I said I would. I work in a big school that uses gobs of copy paper. I asked the Copy Goddess for some empty boxes a couple weeks ago. She was out, but a new shipment of paper came in if I wanted to wait. I went ahead and unloaded all the paper for her and took the boxes. I needed to move all the books off my shelves at home while new floors were being put in. I promised to bring the empty boxes back when I was done, since she kept running out.

Today I brought them all back and the folks in the library were cheering and telling me I was the bomb. For bringing empty boxes back.

So clearly there's a need, people. There are teachers moving classrooms and schools at the end of every year, so now's the time to stock up on boxes. Break them down and bring them in. My favorites are the ones from bookstores because they're mostly the same size.

Box Hack:

That's the secret to moving books, by the way. Pull them off the shelf in order, set them in the box, and then get another box. Don't try to fill the box. It's much better to use way more not-too-heavy boxes than to have well-packed overly heavy boxes that take forever to unload. Now when you set up your bookshelves, you just pull the already alphabetized books out of the box and set them back on the shelf. You can even label the boxes Shelf 1, etc. It you have different bookcases, number them so you have boxes that say things like Case 2, Shelf 3 and so on.

Trust me, I'm the bomb.

Trash It!

The other day I had a few minutes free. I used it to trash more than half the stuff in my top desk drawer. I thought it would be upsetting, but it was more liberating. I now have about a dozen pens that I like and that I bought. All the rest (and there were many) are gone. I don't care how cool they looked or where they came from, I trashed them. Same with stationary I never use and a bunch of other stuff. Some went into my suply cabinet. Some got filed. The rest were trashed. Try it, you'll like it.

(I even spurned a free pen this weekend! They were handing them out at a theater to fill out a form. I shook my head and pulled out my Fisher Space Pen, ninja style. I almost didn't believe it was me.)