Professor Sharon

100 Days Project Day 11 – Take Two

Not that anyone is reading my posts, but I realized that I miscounted already!  As I recommend to my Student Success class students, organization is the key to everything; so take away is that I need to pre-number a calendar and that way I’ll keep track of which day I’m on.

Organization is key to this profession.  I suppose it is to most; although I’ve been on the other side of the desk of a bank manager and insurance officer or two who didn’t look too organized.  And, I really don’t think it was organized chaos either.  I have two desks – one home, and one office – not to mention a briefcase to keep under control.  Most of the time I manage.  In the past, I had a desk job at a children’s writing company where there were lulls in my work and I could really keep organized.  I was fond of that aspect of that job.  My files were always alphabetical, everything got in those files and I could retrieve them!

In my current school office, I made time before classes began to organize my shelves and desktop and only one week in, it has already paid off.  Requests for items, important papers to bring to meetings are readily retrievable.  Now that’s the top of the desk….

The four drawers of file cabinet space are another story.  A number of years ago, it was in order; but not now.  It’s quite awful, and I’m sure I’m reproducing things that already have a file or extra copies for students in there somewhere.  But, I’m working on it.  I’ve been trying to take one file out a day, see what’s in there, correctly label it, and begin to make some sense of those awful drawers.

My home office goes through phases.  The room shares itself with my clothes overflow, my laundry folding and ironing, and my getting dressed in the dark in the morning and don’t disturb the hubby spaces.   So it tends to get a big out of hand faster than my school office as I know not too many people are going to be looking or sitting in there!  And, as I explain to myself it’s multi-purpose.

But the point being that organization and a place to easily get your tasks done, like prepping, grading papers, and just plain thinking on how to get a concept across is really valuable to quality teaching.  Is there research out there to back me up?  Probably, I don’t know, but it’s true for me.   Today I’m thinking about organization.