Organization - left behind.

Ok, if you know me, please feel free to skip this rant...as you've heard it before.  If you don't know me - welcome to my soapbox.

This afternoon I monitored homework club in my classroom for a seventh grade team.  There were a few students who are required to come to homework club and a few of my eighth graders chose to stay and work with me as well.  Really, my small classroom/office was chock full of middle school students working on homework.  I was delighted.

I run a pretty structured homework club;  I check that students wrote in their assignment notebooks what they have to do for the evening, I ask them to prioritize what they are going to get done, and I walk around the classroom making sure that students are working on an assignment.  Today, about 15 minutes into homework club I mentioned to a young man that his binder needed a "Binder 911" - our term for some pretty serious resuscitation of the binder.  Henry looked abashed for a few moments, and then asked, "Do you have a binder I could have? My rings have broken."

Immediately after Henry made his request, two other students raised their hands and asked me for new binders.  We do collect binders from offices and anyone, really, who will give them to us, so we often have nice, 2-3 inch binders hanging around. And, as the unofficial binder organizer, I was happy to help these three kids out.  New binders on their desks, they each began the process of sorting the huge stack of papers that they have been carrying around in a big stack between the covers of their old binder...with no organization system at all - and the paper stack just continued to grow.  As Henry's pile was the largest,  I had him transfer the contents of his old binder into the new binder while I sorted the stack of paper by class and hole-punched them so that they could go into the binder.

Each youngster left my classroom after their Binder 911 feeling pretty good about their work, their assignments, and their organization.  While not perfect, their binders at least had their papers contained in the rings so the risk of a binder explosion (say, on the lunchroom floor) had been limited.  My point?  I know how much better I feel when my closet is clean or the top of my desk has been cleared.  I value the mental clarity that an organized work space provides.  Trust me, this does not come naturally to me, I work on it all the time.  However, organization is not a "tested" subject here in Virginia, so this skill (like so many others) is pushed off - and often left untaught and unsupported.  The 10 minutes in homeroom, or even 45 minutes in homework club is just not enough time to help a student come back from the brink of binder organization disaster.

I will continue to support students who come and ask me for help with binder organization - but deep down, I wish we had the flexibility and capability to offer students true organization and study skills classes that addressed some of the vital skills that they will be expected to have mastered by the time they get to high school.   Another important thing...left behind.