If you are a teacher, you know that inevitably as the school year rolls on your desk can become a cluttered mess. With the thousands of things that teachers are responsible for, it’s easy to let paperwork, craft assignments and gifts from students pile up on your desk.
If you find yourself shoving things from one side of the desk to the other just to make room to grade a few papers or look something up on your laptop, then it’s probably time to clean up.
Save yourself future headaches by taking the time to completely overhaul how you organize your desk. All it takes is a few key items to get yourself more organized and to create a desk environment that’s functional, efficient and one that will make you proud.
Drawer Dividers
Oh the scary, scary drawers of your desk. Can you believe how fast the drawers get to be unusable? As the days and weeks and years go by, stuff will pile up and the drawers are where stuff goes to die. A lot of it will be useful stuff but even more of it will be junk.
Clean it out for good. Be brutal about this. Getting rid of the clutter starts with ruthlessly going through every single drawer to banish old stuff. You'll be amazed at how much better you'll feel about your desk with spotlessly cleaned drawers. Throw away all the garbage that you aren’t even using.
Then put in drawer dividers to organize the things that you do need. Extra erasers, your personal items, and things that don’t need to be on top of your desk are much easier to access if they are divided correctly. Plus, once you have spent the time doing this, you'll be much less likely to just toss items in there willy-nilly.
Large Desk Organizer
You can get of these anywhere or you can even make one yourself out of shelf dividers and small kid sized shoe boxes. It just depends on how creative you want to be. The organizer is great for all those little things you use all the time like stickers. You can even have a few color coded folders to put in each divider to get even more organized.
Bonus: Hide some hard candy or gum in one of the little drawers when you need a mid-day sugary treat.
A Place for Writing Implements
This is a DIY craft idea that is a cinch to tackle. Take four medium sized mason jars, and glue them together with a hot glue gun so it’s permanent. Tip them on their side and put your writing implements in each spot. Now you have a mason jar for permanent markers, pens, mechanical pencils, and a miscellaneous one for whatever else you might need. A red marker? Regular old fashioned #2 pencils? There’s a spot for that. Now you’ll never need scrounge around when you need something to write with. Everything is right where you can access it easily.
Extra Drawers
If you find that your desk just isn’t big enough and you need extra storage, consider adding a stack of plastic drawers which you can find at any store. These drawers are great for all those extra paper materials that you need easy access to but don’t want taking up space on top of your desk or inside its drawers.
On top of these extra drawers, you can even place a small open tool box. These are often divided into little mini slots where you can store even more supplies like Post-It notes, staples, chalk, and extra tape that you might need handy. This setup truly holds a ton of the extra stuff you might need to get through the day.
One More Option
For those of you with very small and cramped classrooms, here’s a radical option: consider getting rid of your desk altogether.
Think about how much area it takes up that you could be using in other ways. If you really feel like your desk isn’t offering that much value to your classroom space, then doing away with it might be the answer. More and more teachers are going this route, but it’s up to you and what you and your school are comfortable with.
This is a fine option if you don’t find yourself sitting at the desk much during the day and if you often take your papers and tests home to grade instead of grading them at your desk after the bells rings and the kids are gone.
You can still have everything you need in pop up temporary drawers without the space clutter of an actual desk.