No, not cleaning up at home. I’ll probably do that tomorrow. Today I cleaned up in my office at school.

I’m getting a Promethean board in the media center, and it involves a wholesale turning-upside-down of the entire media center. I hope it’s worth it. Part of what’s involved is moving where I work, on a table out in the media center, over to where the Promethean board is going to be.

Since I haven’t really used my office (nor the old Mac on the desk) in a couple of years, I decided that I would move my desk over to my new workspace rather than the library table I’ve been using. To do that, of course, I had to tidy up.

I began yesterday, hauling stuff off the shelves and throwing away tons of outdated stuff: Beginning Internet for Teachers; Using Filemaker 3.0; The Mac Demystified (don’t know why I had that one); old school improvement frameworks; the QCC; that kind of thing.

Today I continued, consolidating materials and tossing. It’s great fun. I am reminded of Wallace Stevens’ “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” among other Stevens’ poems, in which he uses the garden as a metaphor for creativity. He usually makes one of two points: first, the universe is a chaotic mess, a wilderness, and we humans organize as much of it as we can into gardens, and creative people are always looking for an exit from the garden, so that we can find more wilderness to organize. His second point is that gardens die and must be torn out and replanted in order to continue to be gardens.

So before I can move ahead into the wonderful future (?) of the Promethean board, I have to in many ways remove some of the old. This was certainly true of the technology stuff I’ve been throwing away.

84 days to go.