OK, everyone knows (or most everyone knows) that I am pretty disorganized at home. Well, I’m pretty disorganized with everything except for categorizing our books with the Library of Congress Cataloguing system and alphabetizing all of our DVDs and using actual card catalogue drawers to organize craft materials, but that’s beside the point. My desk is a mess, my bedroom is a mess, and I really don’t care because those spaces are mine and no one else is allowed to mess with them because they’re mine (except for the husband because what’s mine is his, much to his chagrin) and I organize them in my own messy way. So! Despite a fairly messy desk and messy bedroom, I’m still a generally well-organized person. My offices (the ones in SASC and the one in LLL) were considered borderline OCD by damn near everyone else in the department because of how highly organized I was. Sure, there may have been a couple piles of folders or books on my desk from time to time, but they were always very clearly labeled and stacked and well, organized. After all, my office is my work and work should be done well or else your ass is fired. This is all perfectly logical to me. Then again, logic rarely applies–as is the case of my new classroom.

Yesterday, LGT High School started student registration, and I went in to get a key to my office and to start organizing for the up-coming school year. I mean, it’s bad enough I have no idea what novels I’m teaching for two of my classes this fall or that I have no materials at all for the speech class I’m teaching, but to have a messy and chaotic room is just a set-up for disaster. So Simon and I spent some of yesterday going through things, trying to get an idea as to what all was in the room. We moved around some of the furniture and organized all of the posters/flyers/bulletin board stuff (lots of which I recognized from when I was in high school) before leaving for lunch with Dad and then heading to the house to watch cooking shows and CSI shows and play around with the textbook software I’d found in a plastic tub. (My classroom, btw, has over a dozen plastic tubs just full of random stuff.) We planned on getting up semi-early today to work on the room more.

So around nine o’clock, we head back into the school so he can get his schedule changed and so we can work on the classroom some more. What a mess!! I mean, I thought it was messy yesterday, but that was before I started going through more of the plastic tubs and the stuff in the closet. Books that were totally unrelated were mixed together with art supplies and decorations as well as pieces of games and office supplies. I found a tape recorder with microphone in a tote full of former students’ work along with a coin sorter. In the bottom of one of many bags which obviously came from conventions and conferences, I found a crumbled chocolate chip cookie. Mind you, there’s no trashcan in my room right now, so horrifying stuff like this has to be hauled down the hallway for the time being. After hours and hours of sorting, sifting and rearranging, we finally started making some sense of the room–electronics, plastic organizers, decorations, posters, student work, games, office supplies, dictionaries, arts and crafts supplies, books, folders, whatever–putting it all together into like categories and groups. The room still needs a lot of work, and I mean a lot of work, but a serious over-haul is going to have to wait until next summer. For right now, my main concern is making the room liveable and functional. I want to be able to find the important supplies quickly and easily, and I want all of the random stuff to be put away out of the way where it won’t interfere with daily operations. I have a feeling that a lot of this stuff is just going to have to be moved out of there at some point which means either finding some other place to put it in the school or actually taking some of it home to store there. For now, I’m just sinking in stuff and need to spend some time learning to tread through it before I’ll be able to get anywhere organized. Am I a bit OCD? Hells yes. Is that a bad thing when there’s a shitload of stuff that needs to be organized? NO! Luckily I’m not both OCD and a perfectionist. Screw perfect; just give me functional!

I’m back in the Haute for the weekend, and I’m probably going to spend a sizeable portion of my time here packing more stuff to take to LGT and preparing lesson plans for the French classes. At least I did finally find the teacher’s edition of the French I-III classes. Now if only I had any idea what the other three classes are supposed to cover… I hate feeling disorganized and disoriented. At least next week is going to help with both of those (as orientation is Tuesday and I’ll organize the rest of the week) and so I’ll be more prepared for teaching once it starts the 13th. Madness. I don’t know that I’d be capable of starting classes a week from Monday if I weren’t so obsessive-compulsive.