My hoarding started years ago. My first teaching job was in a prison. I taught ABE and GED classes and created an education program for the county prison. I loved that first job in its quirky way of scaring the pants off me and inspiring me to want to give the gift of language to others (trust me...drug dealers and prostitutes, most of the clients in a county jail, know a lot more about math than I do).
But, here is the thing...you can't just take any ole thing into a prison. Because inmates, are, well, not the most trustworthy folk around, you can't just bring in books for them. You have to be able to create your own worksheets and activities while in the jail. Plus, there is no budget, so you have to make due with what is around.
Now, in those infant days of the internet (yes...it was that long ago), there wasn't a Purdue OWL I could jump onto to print out worksheets. I had to make up my own stuff based on a few old GED and ABE prep books. So, I would head to the nearest library in my free time, read through books in the library, remember all that stuff, go into the prison, make up assignments, and, poof! We created an in house system of activities for the inmates. It was heavy work, but I started to store up a list of bookmarks in my head. Since I wanted to teach them "practical" reading, I would scan newspapers, magazines, and anything else that held current events. I would go to places where they might be able to get a job with a criminal background (McDonalds, Burger King, etc.) and memorized the applications so I could recreate them on the ancient 400000 ton desktop computer. That was where my hoarding began.
As the internet grew, and my professional experience and opportunities grew along side, I was able to stop the daily visits to the Bethlehem Public Library, and, instead, spent hours combing the internet for awesome interactive activities for my college students. Back then, we were afraid that websites would just vanish, and so we printed every single thing out that was juicy and good. I had stacks of paper lining my office, the car, my wee little apartment in Fountain Hill....paper, paper everywhere.
With the invention of bookmarking and RSS Readers, I was able to stop printing and just started hoarding links. And, for the better part of 7 years, I have done nothing but store links, share links, and, sometimes, use them. It is chaos.
I am a huge fan of the A&E show, Hoarders. I watch it before I do heavy cleaning; it helps me to toss and donate. But, ye gads, is there a Hoarders for digital collectors?
Right now, my bookmarks list is into the thousands, my RSS list is into the thousands, and I follow Twitter like crazy and add more stuff. How can I find anything??? Will I remember what I have there?
So, here is my goal...I am going to use the amazing tool, Evernote, to sort my bookmarks, and I have started cleaning out RSS feeds. It was a lot easier to collect these links than it is to purge them. But, I am not so attached as I thought I was about these links.
Sure, there are some items that I need to keep. For example, I want to remember how to find out how to get to the home page of Xtrranormal. It isn't a site I use every day, but it is one that I use about every 5-6 months for student projects. I also think my children will be able to use it, too, as they are interested in learning how to program games. Another site, like an article about a movie about the Mole People living under NYC, well, I can find that again if I need it, or something similar.
So, here is what I learned today: I can dump bookmarks. I can overcome.
Image Source
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment! I will check it out, and if you are not a spammer, I will post your comment!