I’ve heard that you can tell how smooth a household runs by examining the organization of the pantry. I don’t know if that is true; but, after working one-on-one with Jr. Highers this year, I know that you can tell a lot about a student by looking at the state of their binder.
I work with one Jr. High boy who came to me his first day with a binder full of loose papers, some in tact, others sloppily taped back together. The day before I was to meet with him, his mom called me distressed: she didn’t know what was wrong with her son! “He’s failing everything, but he’s such a smart boy!”
Well mom…I hate to break it to you, but it’s not your boy’s intelligence that needs a good makeover; it’s his binder.
During our first session together, I thought we should do a complete purge of his binder and rebuild from the inside out. “Show me what you’ve got.” He opened his binder, and I was fully expecting to see flies circle out from it. If his binder represented his life, then we had a lot of work to do. You see, after working with kids now for six years, I’ve come to realize that a binder is a window into whom they are as a person.( A palm reader...a binder reader!!!!!??!! )
To start out, I explained to this boy (whom I’ll call Todd) that the purpose of a binder was to bind papers together; hence, the three metal rings in the middle. He paused for a moment, and then I saw the light go on: “Oh, that must be why the teachers put those three holes on the side of the paper.”
Exactly.
First, we sifted through the clutter and purged anything that wasn’t school related: song lyrics (with a lot of four asterisks in place of words)…. penciled caricatures of his classmates …several candy bar wrappers adhered to the inside by several wads of hot pink chewing gum….and a plastic baggie of something that was way past expiration date.
I think it was best to start from a clean slate.
We dumped everything, and I asked him where his actual school papers were. After a moment, he explained matter-of-factly that they were "tucked away in his locker."
I decided to take a little journey up to his locker.
We marched right up to it, and I noticed a fruit fly circling nearby in the hallway. Upon opening his locker, I realized that yes, Todd did have all his papers; however, they were sprinkled about like seeds. The only thing growing in this locker though, was a stench that needed to be extinguished. He dug through his papers to uncover, at the very bottom of his locker, a plastic grocery bag with liquid in it. Water? Juice? “Todd, what in the world is that?” He crinkled his nose, picked it up with his thumb and index finger like a dirty diaper, and toted it across the hall to the garbage. “Todd,” I repeated again, “WHAT was that?!”
He looked at me, bowed his head in shame, and declared that it used to be a banana.
We also found the source of the fruit fly colony.
After completely gutting his locker, I realized that if he lived in a perpetual state of disarray, how could he accomplish anything?! He failed to turn papers in, thus receiving Zeros. He lost assignments, notes, and books. His life seemingly got lost in the shuffle of his papers; and like a sinkhole, it was eventually going to swallow him whole.
He needed an intervention; and he needed it now.
We installed some locker shelves, binder subject dividers and an assignment notebook. We made goals; personal goals, academic goals and organizational goals. Yes, I explain his English. I helped him rewrite essays and memorize important dates. However, I realized that none of this mattered unless his binder and locker were in proper working order. This was the root of all his problems.
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