Untold Junk

I was a squirrel in a past life, or will be in a future life. I’ve started to clear out my filing cabinets and found untold junk. Important documents I was going to read later but never did; scraps of newspapers and magazines that I was going to incorporate into lessons but are now curled up and yellowing; photocopies of reports from the days of yore when they were still handwritten; papers I’d searched for high and low but were under my nose all along; confiscated notes from Year 8s who are now grown up and have left school; lesson plans long forgotten but gladly rediscovered… and all because I’m such a hoarder.

But now the hardest bit: how can I part with stuff? How can I sort the wheat from the chaff, the useful resources from those I will never need again? Obviously a lot of the above list is easily jettisoned, but as I don’t know what the new school has yet, I can’t decide what I will need. Besides, what if I have to teach beyond what I’m expecting? What if I move schools again in a couple of years? So even what should be a simple job of clearing out my classroom and packing up papers into crates is taking much longer than I expected.