Ok... It's been a long time since I've written anything on my blog. It's true. It's not entirely my fault either... but keeping up with a blog was one way that I was attempting to get myself into a more disciplined routine for dissertating. So now, I have no choice. I need to start working again. And as a result... I need to clean my @$#% office! It's amazing to me how quickly semesters' worth of old notes, junk, notebooks, student exams, assignments... all kinds of things, begin encroaching on the little sliver of sanity space that you carve out for yourself to work in. I'm amazed to find that I have notes (good ones) that date back through college... even high school. My mother periodically calls and asks when I'm going to get up the guts to throw away my notes from 5th grade. Honestly. I don't know what I think I could actually *use* them for... I dunno... maybe one day my child will be sick and need to copy them in order to keep up? In any case, it's come down to the wire now... we need to make more room in our appartment, and I need to find new ways of making my office area leaner, meaner and more effective. But this leaves me with the following questions.
How long does someone save their notes? Where do you put them once the semester is over? I've got binders upon binders worth... but then there are notebooks, coursepackets... all kinds of handouts... Does anyone keep these? Have you ever found a use for them? I mean, I have this fantastic packet of post-colonial readings.... They're really good selections... but am I going to use them again? Maybe. I mean... Maybe if one day someone asks a really good question about a Derek Walcott... I can look up my post-colonial packet and say... "Ah... this is what Spivak would say to that!"
But then again, how likely is that? Or, is it assumed that if I haven't committed all of it to memory by now... that I'm never going to remember where it is anyway? I mean, I take some pretty good notes... I still have my Honors American Literature study guide for my high school American Lit final exam. Mind you... it was a good class... I learned more in it than I did in my 19th century American lit. class in college. But it's highly unlikely that I'm going to have to take that exam again... and yet... I can't seem to part with this relatively insignificant piece of paper.
There is another category of notes... these slightly more useful... that also seems like one of the largest self-created organizational nightmares ever. Qualifying exam notes. Now, some of these have, as you could guess, turned into disseration notes. Those have a special place. But at the same time, I went at taking background notes for this exam with a particular... shall we say... gusto. By background, I mean lists of facts, dates and publications for over 75 poets and 20 fiction writers. I have 14 spiral bound notebooks with background information/articles/fact sheets on various poets, poetic movements, literary movements, etc. I tried to use them to produce some of my lectures for last semester... the only problem was that my 10-minutes-at-the-beginning-of-class lecture turned into a 6-page, typed, single space lecture on topics such as realism, naturalism, lynching, the American Dream... so on and so forth. About mid-way through delivering one of these (admittedly) boring letures, I looked up and realized that I'd completely lost nearly half the student population to a bizarre condition that included nasal wheezing, drooling, and lack of eyelid control. Not my most astounding classroom performance.
So, I ask... what do you do with these, quite literally, tons of accumulated bits of paper upon which you have poured out your time, effort, energy... and one might hope learning. Do you admit to yourself that you're never going to be able to find the notes you need when you want them and simply resign yourself to looking it up again the next time you need it? Or, do you simply allow yourself to continue to be subsumed by pounds upon pounds of old notebooks, notecards, folders, and binders... hoping that if nothing else... they might provide the same function as barbells... something to lift, shift, and shuffle somewhere new at the start of each new term.
That's all I can handle for now. I'm off to throw out old exams (it's ok if they haven't picked 'em up in 4-5 years, right?) and perhaps even find a way out of this academic wasteland!
I'm tossing my lasso out there to see how this goes. Hopefully, I'll be up and running soon.