Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Organizing File Cabinets

Summer is a great time to organize the classroom because the students aren't there and there are no urgent demands like writing lesson plans or turning in grades. Why organize? There are a few reasons: (a) taking stock of what is in the classroom, (b) deciding what to keep and what to put in storage, and (c) being efficient and knowing where everything is. Organizing takes careful planning, and I've been thinking about where things should go for the last few months. Teaching classes has just kept me too busy, so finally it is time to get organized!

After going through all of the wind instruments, my father-in-law and I went through the percussion cabinet and the elementary percussion shelves. The main goal was to organize the percussion cabinet, and we started by taking everything out. Next, we decided what to keep in the cabinet based on how often the students used whatever "it" was. Of course, drum sticks, practice pads, and auxilliary percussion stayed in the top shelves, but since the drum hardware was essentially just taking up space, I put it in a different container and stored it in the music office. There was a lot of junk - pieces of hardware that were bent and broken, and pieces that didn't really go to anything in particular. We were able to make a lot of space by getting rid of some of these things, and we used that space to store the elementary percussion. Now instead of a drum cabinet and a bookshelf full of percussion instruments, everything fits inside the mobile cabinet. Very handy.

With the percussion project finished, I decided to start on a big organization project that has been on my to-do list since I first arrived at the school. I wanted to figure out what exactly was in all of the file cabinets around the music room. It was very difficult for me to get a sense of it all, so we literally pulled every shelf out and lined them up on the floor in the middle of the room. Then I walked around it all several times, poking through each drawer and figuring out what all there was. During the combining process of our two schools, Dutton and Brady, all of the filing cabinets were moved to Dutton, but their contents were never combined. I had two different cabinets full of SATB music from two different schools, for example. After judging what different types of materials I had (magazines, solo/ensemble, instrument supplies, choral music) and how much of it, I sketched out an idea for where everything will go. That was enough work for one day, so the next step, actually organizing it all, begins tomorrow.

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