Classroom Closet Clean-up

So the closet in my classroom was a disaster area. Lesson plans, curriculum guides, art supplies, and textbooks were shoved into this good-sized closet along with materials left from the previous teacher who taught in that room. Add to that all that was piled in there by the maintenance staff when they replaced my carpets and you can start to get the picture - I didn't ever open the door because things would fall off the shelf.

It was time. I had to address the issue, and during post-planning (between a myriad of meetings, of course) I made time to clean out the closet of doom (and dust, I later found). My tactic: divide and conquer, and fast.

Step 1. Take everything out. You can't organize unless you see what you have, and what you are working with. Once everything was spilled out all over my room, it was like Christmas in June. I found great lesson activities and books that I had no idea I owned. It was also like a graveyard - I had articles and curriculum guides so outdated that I was embarrassed to throw them in the recycle bin fearing someone would see it and connect it to me.

Step 2. Make piles. By putting things in piles I was able to see how many things I had in duplicate or worse, triplicate, which made recycling that much easier. I was able to create piles of things no longer needed that I could pass on to colleagues who might be better able to use it.

Step 3. Recycle, big time. Just about everything these days is on the internet and can be found with just a few clicks. I had been keeping a hard copy of everything - articles, newspapers, magazines, lesson plans - but I realized what a waste of space that was. I kept planning to use the magazines in class, and every once in a while I did. But an article every once in a while doesn't make up for keeping a stack of nearly 200 magazines. Into the recycle bin they went, and guess what? I haven't missed them since.

Step 4. Replace in groups. Once the piles were organized all over my tables, replacing the important things back into the closets was easy. Grouped by topic, I can now find exactly what I'm looking for. Binders here, DVDs there, Economics to the left, Journalism to the right. Ahhh (that's me breathing a sigh of relief).