Paperless - Day One

Paper-free for the first time EVER yesterday. The kids are excited, but I'm screaming on the inside because I have spent the past 15 years chained to a copy machine: stapling, hole punching collating and unjamming. For all intents and purposes, I was born with a red pen in my hand. But today, a Tuesday in January, I didn't even see my nemesis: that faxing, copying monolith downstairs in the basement that I used to sweet talk whenever it came close to overheating.

In English, I stated my case and as I was explaining why I wanted no more paper to be used in my classroom, I could have heard a pin drop. I had them! And I had thrown down the gauntlet for myself too. If I said it out loud and did this in every class today, I had to own it for the rest of the year. This is the kind of pressure I have to put on myself. Own it or look like a dummy in front of my students. I don't have a choice now...

In English we talked for a while exchanging ideas and asking questions about how this was all going to work. "No, I didn't clear this with Mr. Kvande first." "I'm not sure if it's ok for you to bring in your iPad from home." "This doesn't mean you just get to break out your phones and start texting me all day." "How are we going to take tests?" "How will we study?" "My dad is 48; he isn't going to understand this concept." "This is COOL."

After that, instead of taking notes on the computer like most do, we just talked about irony and how we use it every day when we are being sarcastic with our friends and parents,and how we see it in scary movies all the time. It was the most productive note session I have had all year. A couple of girls freaked out because they couldn't write anything down, so I think I will set them up with Evernote.com so that they can have the notes somewhere. I also gave them links to the powerpoint on my livebinder.com page.

The 7th graders were similarly interested in this endeavor. For the first paperless day, I had them access their email accounts and write some model sentences out and then send it to me.