Hello, my name is Charles Ackerman, and I have an addiction. It began when I was in elementary school. It was innocent enough. I’d sneak it in the wrong folder. Or neatly pile it between books.
But then it got worse. Assignments came piling in- all kinds of notes and homework I had to return just added to the stress. So my problem got worse and worse. It lead me to be forgetful, and it made my grades fall. Sure, I was smart enough to do better, and my frustrated parents frequently reminded me of this. But they couldn’t help my addiction.
For years I struggled, until I finally sobered up in the new environment of college. Surrounded by new people and a new environment, I was strong enough to break free. But now that I’m a teacher, I’m afraid I may be slipping back in to my old ways.
I am addicted to paper.
I’ve always had a hard time managing it. In my formative years I couldn’t manage it. I tried binders, folders, stuffing it into backpacks and lockers, ignoring it, embracing it, all to no avail. My grades in high school weren’t very good, I was a ‘B’ student when I graduated.
College has very little by the way of paperwork, and to this day I still have almost every paper I’ve written and every note I took, because I kept everything organized and documented electronically, where I can find a single document just by searching for it with my Mac’s Spotlight feature. As a teacher though, I find myself getting more and more paper that I have a hard time managing. It’s not the information I have a hard time managing so much as it is the raw amount of processed deceased organic tree matter and the inherent difficulties that relate to its organization.
For example, I find it incredibly easy to find notes and essays from college because I have a document named “Doc Outline” inside a folder called “Techniques in Documentary Filmmaking” inside a folder called “Spring 2009″ inside a folder called “College Work” inside my “Documents” folder. This is much more useful and flexible than the real-world counterpart of the “folder” – that is, the drab yellow folder made of processed bark that can only stretch to limit and could never, ever, contain so much paper as would be necessary to convey all the data I accumulated at college.
And even if it could, it would be a mess. And heavy. And where would I put something like that? What a mess to even consider.
I suppose I am a resident (or victim) of the digital village. I was born in 1987; I stand with one leg in the world of the typewriter, the other in the land of the iPhone. I possesses what I’ve heard referred to as a “transactional memory” in that I remember where I store information rather than the information itself, a phenomenon blatantly apparent in any high school across America today, yet I also value the storage of information inside my own head.
It is perhaps because of this split nature that I am able to relate to my older co-workers while also impressing my younger students with my adept handling of “the Internets”. But when it comes to paper, it becomes increasingly clear that I’m playing a game that I can’t win.
It’s either me, or the paper. And damned if it’ll be me.
Therefore, RESOLVED:
I shall make 2012 the year I adopt an alternative to the paper world: where I refuse to allow my desk to become cluttered with countless staff-development handouts and feeble copies of tedious paperwork that allows a student to enter the nurse’s office or accompanies them to the dean.
Be it resolved that by the end of this year, I will have adopted a policy, leveraging the power of information technology upon the old technology of information (read: paper), magnanimous and glorious in equal part: SCAN AND SHRED.
Also, I will floss every night this year. That’s the other part of my New Year’s Resolution. But that would make for an even less interesting read.
