At the beginning of this year, I was very unorganized. I would put all of my papers that are handed back into the pockets of my binders, despite Mrs. Durkee always telling us to hole punch all of our work and put it in the rings of our binder. I would continue to lose papers and notes I needed for classwork and homework. She continued to tell us to put our work where it goes because we would have surprise binder checks. After two binder checks I finally decided to organize, my binder and whole punch all of my work, which is how I grew in organization.

 

Our first binder check was a surprise and I had all of my papers in the pocket of my binder so to avoid getting points off for that I took them out and out them into my folder. This resulted in me losing points for not having papers in the correct tabs of out binders. Most of the notes that I did not have in my binder were over the unit we were on at the time, which was the American Revolution. When I went to put the papers back in my binder, I had lost many of my notes over the war in the North, 1775-1778. The paper talked about Washington and how he responded to his appointment as commander. Also, before organizing my binder, I had many grades that were not 100%. For example, on my event-tracking log I got an 83.33%. On the event tracker, we had to have the events of the American Revolution, the date, the perspective they involved (loyalist, patriot, African American, women), the effect it had on the Revolution, and how your chosen perspective would have seen the event. Since not all of my papers were in my binder and I was not sure where they were, I could not use my notes on the events to fill out the tracker log. This was when I realized that I needed to clean my binder and put papers where they needed to go.

 

I decided it was time to clean my binder out and take the papers that were in my pockets of my binder and in my folder, and hole punch them and put them behind the tab they go in. After I did this, my papers were very easy to find, I could look in the notes, Work, or reading sections and find all of the work I had received back. After I had cleaned it, I started to get better grades on my work because I could find my notes to study from. I did still struggle to remember to hole punch all of my work and put it in the rings, but I am definitely better at remembering now than I was before. I used to have a whole stack of papers, whereas now I only have about five at a time. Being organized will really help me in future classes with schoolwork and at home with all of my old school work. Now I just need to work on always remembering to put my work where it goes and not to keep it all in my homework folder.