Help, Readers! My Messy Desk – Any Suggestions?

This is my desk at school. (I teach Grade Three in an American School in the Middle East. ) We all have small desks, measuring about 18″ x 42.” I have a wooden table with a shelf (about 14″ deep) next to my desk in the left-hand side of the picture. We don’t have much space in our classrooms, and you can see a student’s desk actually right up against the front of my desk. The student’s desk is facing the chalkboard, and is about four feet away from it. We barely have walking room in our class.

As you see in the back, we have low cupboards around the edges of the room, but if you are standing, you really have to bend down to get into them. We have NO counter-space in our classrooms. That’s my chair (along with my crutches) in the back.

The red box on the left side is where I have students turn in worksheets in the morning, so that they are easily accessible to me to grade during my free period.

The reason you see a bottle (and perhaps a couple of cups) on my desk is that our school has no drinking fountains. Each person has to have their own bottle, or else they have to try to drink out of the classroom faucet. (We do have one low child-sized sink in the room, with a cold-water tap, that has well water only.)

The reason you see toilet paper rolls on my desk (I’m sure you must all be wondering why THEY are there) is that our school does not keep toilet paper in the restroom. We are required to keep it in our classrooms, and tear off pieces for students each time they need to use the restroom. They used to keep it in the restroom, but due to some students throwing (or dropping) whole rolls into the toilet several times, every teacher is now required to keep it in their classroom only.

So, how did my desk get this way? In addition to having on-going projects, a tiny desk, no counters, no file cabinets; an assistant who puts everything, including extra photocopies on top of my desk, where they get mixed in with everything else, I am on two crutches (due to a permanent bone condition) making it difficult for me to carry anything from my desk to another part of the room. I do manage OK, but this desk situation really gets me down.

We have NO file cabinets in which to store photocopies. My solution these last two years has been to save the cardboard boxes some of our school supplies arrive in, and to hand-make file folders out of tagboard, which I then put in several cardboard boxes, and keep on shelves.

In the cupboards right behind my desk, I store my math and science supplies, where they are easily accessible to me, as I cannot carry them across the room (on two crutches). I do have some shelves in the coat room (on the other side of the class, where I can store paper supplies (like the orange and blue construction paper kind you see in the back side of my desk.

I am continually trying to work on several class projects, yet have no place to store (or lay on a counter top) ongoing projects. So I am trying to grade papers on top of all this mess. I’ve made a little progress getting rid of some of these things, but other things have taken their place, so it remains about as bad as in this picture (taken two months ago). Sometimes I don’t grade the papers, and instead work on the desk, but a lot of the mess around the desk is part of on-going projects that cannot be put away until the projects are finished (mainly because we have no place to store them, such as counter-tops, as our classroom cupboards are full). These include colored construction paper we were cutting to make mosaics, and boxes of rocks we were studying in science class. But whenever I leave the papers, the daily grading gets too far behind, and I can’t go ahead with the class. So I feel the classwork has to take priority.

In addition to being small, our handmade desks have no center drawer, but four TINY side drawers, two on each side, in which it is difficult to keep much except pens and pencils, a notepad, stars for students’ work, and paper clips. I made two additional drawers at the bottom (in big open spaces they left) out of two more cardboard boxes. Furthermore, the space made under the desk for the teacher’s legs is not wide enough to even pull in the chair! So this is obviously painful for one’s back.

All I can say, is any teacher who has a good BIG desk in their classroom, with decent drawers; or has counter tops, or file cabinets; I HOPE YOU REALLY APPRECIATE IT !!!

If anyone has any suggestions, they would be much appreciated! This is a continual problem for me every year.

Eileen

P.S. - I hope to be able to show you a picture, some time in the future, of my desk CLEANED UP!

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