The Binder
It became clear to me the day my sixth grader’s first progress report came home that I needed to help him get organized.
The grades, all low, were followed with the phrase “late or missing work lowers grade.”
When he breezed in the door after school that day, I didn’t hold back.
“Hi, John-got your progress report. Let’s take a look at your binder.”
Wide eyed, he followed me to his room and dumped the contents of his backpack on to his bed.
The binder, made of thick weave army green nylon, zipped from top to bottom. The letters ACDC had been painted painstakingly with whiteout. When he unzipped the binder, all of the late and missing work came tumbling out, along with tattered dividers, their holes ripped, and an assortment of binder and graph paper. Poor John looked at me with a sick look on his face, and I regretted humiliating him immediately as a memory from third grade came back to haunt me.
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“Laura? I’d like you to stay a minute after school,” said Mrs. Elliott, my third grade teacher. I felt the blood rush to my face as the eyes of my classmates landed on me-again. Just weeks before, I had asked Mrs. Elliott if I could go to the bathroom-she said no, and I wet my pants.
Mrs. Elliott had been especially emotional since President Kennedy’s assassination the week before. I felt scared being all alone in the classroom with her.
“Laura, where is your letter to Jackie Kennedy?” she asked, hands on her hips. Looking up at her, it occurred to me her black hair and eyebrows were just like Jackie Kennedy’s, but her stern face wasn’t pretty, even when she smiled.
“I thought I gave it to you,” I said, tugging nervously at my white blonde pigtails. “Maybe its in my desk.”
“Let’s take a look,” she said, pulling up the wooden lid.
The contents of my desk, papers, pencils, erasers, markers, folders and books were a jumble-similar to the numerous junk drawers that I have today. Mrs. Elliott emptied my desk in three armfuls, hoisting the mess to the floor like dirty laundry into the washing machine. I kneeled down with a lump on my throat and attempted to stack the tattered and dog-eared papers into piles while she gathered my pencils in disgust. I tried to hide my tears, but it was no use, and Mrs. Elliott handed some tissues and waited for me to collect myself.
“I don’t think it’s in here,” I managed. “I think I mailed it already.”
We both knew I hadn’t.
“You are a bright girl, Laura, but if you don’t get organized, your schoolwork will suffer, and your life is going to be very difficult.” She left me to organize my desk while she sat at her desk grading papers. But as I attempted to make some order of the jumble before me, it occurred to me that I had no idea how or where to start.
That is how I felt when I attempted to put John’s binder back together with him. We started with new dividers for each class. Then we went to the stationery store and got those little round reinforcers for the torn binder paper holes. But when it was time to put everything back in the binder, I clutched.
“Do you need to keep the old stuff? Maybe we should have a section for new stuff, and another for old stuff. And then when you’re done with homework, maybe that should go somewhere else. What do you think?”
John looked up at me, looked back to his binder, then up at me again.
“Should I just put it all together?” he asked with a half smile on his face. The tension melted away as I admitted to him that I had no idea. I confessed that I had never been that organized but that I was constantly working at it. I showed him all of my organization books, and the articles I had saved from magazines about how to get organized, that, by the way, were shoved in the living room junk drawer along with a cuisinart blade and some pruning shears. I reassured him that his dad was organized, and that there was still hope for him. I suggested his dad look over his stuff and help him figure out a system, but he was quick to nix that idea.
“People who are organized don’t get people who aren’t.” He was right. Had I ever asked my husband to please look in the dining room junk drawer to help me figure out a system
to arrange the assortment of medical bills, sharpies and empty CD covers?
We agreed instead to look through his binder every week or so, and he asked me if I could remind him each morning to turn his homework in. The system is working pretty well, but we are always working on it. As for the letter to Jackie Kennedy, I know I wrote it.
Maybe my mom mailed it for me.
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