Hi All,

This is my first year teaching (also in the alternate route) in a public school in the States. Before, I taught abroad, that's so different from here. Anyways, I feel like I've been a disheveled mess in the beginning but now with the meds, I'm much better. However, I still find myself with a mess of papers collected together. I'm in need of any organizational strategies you guys can offer. Also, my classroom is the back of the library and so I don't have the luxuries of a proper teacher desk. I basically have some shelves in the library. I teach the younger grades (first and second) and so I can get away with more things, but I feel like I'm scarring them because I have a problem with providing them more structure. I do lack structure in my life.

movingforward,

What kinds of papers are piling up? Is it student work or just misc. admin-type stuff?

I teach high school so I'm not sure if this will help but I have turn-in trays for each hour of my day. If I collect papers, I put them right in that tray. Most of the time the kids turn in things themselves.

My goal this year was to empty out those trays by transferring them to a separate set of trays behind my desk, inaccessible to the students (two for each hour: first one is the 'to be graded' papers and the second is for 'graded papers to hand back'). I have not been good about my goal to empty the student ones each day but at least all of the papers are generally in one place at a time instead of in piles on my desk where things tend to disappear.

I'm still struggling with the paper mess, too, but if I didn't have this system it would be one hundred times worse.