Packrat

Hello, my name is Dominic, and I am a packrat. I have been for many years, and although I admitted this before, I am finally working on doing something to “fix” the situation. The other day while working on some online tools for my students, my Twitter network, names will remain anonymous just so I do not become a name dropper,  ran amok with discussions on educators who have way too many paper files around the home and classroom. I jumped in whole-heartedly, gleefully if you will, at the thought than I now have evidence that I am not alone in my predicament. The issue was possibly a continuation of a post brought up earlier in the week when a contact mentioned that he was scanning all of his hard copy documents into electronic .pdf files.  The idea hit me that my attempts to convert my hard copy files by typing is a futile endeavor, I never paid attention in 9th grade typing class…scanning will be the way to go.

This is not a cop-out, but I have reasons for  being this way. I am a second generation Social Studies teacher, I inherited my father’s file cabinet and added a couple of my own. I was brought up seeing how Social Studies teachers collect information. Later in college, my professors embedded the concept of “you never know what your budget at school will be, so collect all you can while you can!” Reinforcement at it’s best…I am a digital immigrant, I remember my first stint in grad school, we took notes on this new tool, the I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T. In fact I know I still have my notebook from that class with my notes on how to search this new tool. It contains all of the helping and control words necessary to search correctly.

This brings me to something that made me laugh yesterday in class and unfortunately disrupt my intern’s class. I had a student cleaning out my book cupboard to make space for my Econ books. No big deal, student did not want to stay in study hall and asked to help. The student came across a notebook from 1986, it contained notes from when I was my fraternity’s contact for the homecoming parade at IUP. Names and numbers leapt from the pages, which brought back a bunch of thoughts I don’t normally keep active. They were great times, but it is not efficient to have those thoughts active with everything else going on in life…22 years later.

The last example I have is one I use with my senior Econ classes. It deals with opportunity costs and how personal the concept is. When I was around 6 or 7, my Grandpap gave me a little pen knife, maybe it is an inch or so long, along with one he got for working at U.S. Steel in Duquesne, PA for many years. It is about the same size. I was so proud of them until I hit adolescence, then they became just toys. I wanted bigger knives like my friends had so my Grandpap’s presents to me were relegated to a drawer in my room.

I forgot about them until much later in life. I did not remember seeing them when I moved to my own house. My Grandpap was much older and for some reason the thoughts of those knives hit me. At first I thought they were gone, one of those spiteful adolescent purges when told to clean your room. It took awhile, but after some time I found them. They were then moved to the bar my Grandpap gave me when I bought my house, it too had been his. After realizing how important those items are to me, I would not let go of them for anything in the world. When I tell my students about the knives, they laugh I could not even sell them at a garage sale for $1.00, but they mean a lot to me, even before my Grandpap left us a few years back.

Because of this incident I was unrepentant about compulsion to be a packrat. Now I realize I need to tier my compulsion, personal mementos, no matter how corny will be kept, information that can be digitized will be sent into the great digital cloud of information that now surrounds us all. My only question now is, what will I do with all of the flash drives I will need?