Reduced to a Fool

Though I got rid of my students yesterday, today was my actual last day of work. I spent the day attending meetings, finalizing grades, and most of all, cleaning out my classroom entirely. At the end of the year, I find myself with a lot of paper left over: worksheets I never distributed, completed assignments I never handed back, and a whole forest worth of sheets I never graded in the first place. Since my school doesn't recycle, I took it upon myself to bring it all home to dispose of it properly. An armload at a time, I transported all of this paper, which literally filled my entire trunk and most of my back seat. As I scurried back and forth between my classroom and the parking lot, many coworkers stopped me to ask what I was doing. Their response ranged as follows: "Good for you, I used to recycle"; "Oh, I just throw all that out"; "I can't believe you're willing to spend your time doing that"; and a very blunt "Why?!" At a meeting later, someone asked condescendingly, "Have you saved the world yet, Kevin?" followed by a cluster of people laughing, indicating it had been an earlier topic of discussion. Another individual referred to me as a "rabid recycler." Though the connotation was perhaps negative, it was said like a compliment, so I'll accept it.

As far as I can determine, the majority of people are okay with recycling, so long as it requires no effort or energy - at that point, pursuing the activity makes you crazy. Sigh. Still, I can't believe the attitude of some of my educated adult coworkers -- they could easily serve as ridiculous adversaries in a save-the-earth commercial. "You recycle?! What are you, dumb? You should litter! All the cool kids do it. I like global warming: it'll make my inevitable transition to hell less jarring." Previously, I thought I had been exaggerating the notion of recycling as a perversion, but I guess some people really are not only apathetic, but antagonistic to the cause.

Let's transition from recycling to reusing. In addition to paper, I had to remove the mannequin, the mascot I recovered from a dumpster, from my classroom. Rather than handing out multiple copies of announcements, I would generally just tape it to the mannequin's chest to attract the students' attention. (That, my friends, is known as reducing.) The only way it would fit in my car was to lay it vertically with its legs raised. The entire car ride home, I continually watched fellow commuters do double takes at the awkward body in my car drowning in a sea of papers. One car pulled up so closely alongside me to get a better look that I thought there might be a collision.

As teachers, we live by the three Rs: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. That said, if we don't adopt an additional three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle), are we really providing these kids with a solid future?