Dirty Secrets

We all have them. There are things we do that we're not proud of and whatever your dirty secret is, know that you're not the only one with a confession to make.
I'll go first...
Okay...I used to throw student work away.

Ahhh, that feels better.
Before you judge me, let me explain. Procrastination is my weakness and I used to allow student work to accumulate into a Mt. Vesuvius-like peak that ultimately became too daunting to tackle.
Test, quizzes and projects always made their way home but practice work and other miscellaneous assignments ended up in the trash.
Let me assure you, I felt terrible, but I didn't have a system to keep me on any sort of schedule. It was my first year and I was drowning. I knew I had to think of something to keep me on track.
I decided to dedicate a wall to student work. I bought clear folders that fastened horizontally with a string. I stapled the folders to a bulletin board and placed name tags on each of them.

Our work here is done! board.

Here is a picture:

I call them pockets. When students finish their work they put it in their pocket. I can easily see who still needs to finish or who finished really fast. At anytime during the day, I can grade the papers easily. The papers stick out on top and if there is only one page, I don't even have to pull it out to grade it. The clear folders let me see their work quickly and I only pull papers out to make a quick note. This has eliminated mountains of paper.

This photo is from last year because this year I'm going to try something new. This takes up so much prime bulletin board space so I'm going to try to hang the pockets somewhere else in order to make room for a more meaningful writing board. If you have extra wall space though, the pocket board works wonders!!!

Now, what is your dirty secret? I bet we could think of a way to reconcile it!