Bag of Goodies

Have you seen the series of ads that ask, "What's in your wallet?" It's an interesting question - if we pretend not to notice they're actually wanting to know what kind of credit card you carry. When I was a kid I had a  red St. Louis Cardinal wallet with a velcro strap, an ad for KHTR Hit Radio, and many, many pockets. When you're nine years old you don't really need all these pockets in your wallet. Just a place to keep a few dollar bills and maybe some change. I would fill the other spots with random stuff- baseball cards, bits of paper, and such.

My wallet today is quite different. No longer bright red, it's a boring black leather model that holds my drivers license as well as an assortment of credit cards and insurance cards. Rarely is there any real money in it. Or pictures. Or much of anything. If it were left as an artifact to help future generations better understand what life was like in 2012 I believe they would be unimpressed. Bored, even.

There's this really great book I like to use in my classroom called Material World. The authors of the book traveled the world asking people from various nations to pull everything out of their house to be photographed. It provides a great look into how cultures, subcultures really, go about accumulating stuff so differently - or not at all. There are those with lots and lots of things like this family...

And then there are those with almost nothing at all...

You can probably imagine what the photos of the American families looked like. Loads of things all over their yard, in the driveway, and spilling out into the road. We are a nation of consumers, collectors, and  - occasionally - hoarders.

I don't mean to pass judgment or sneer down my nose at anyone. How could I? You should see what I keep just in my backpack. Yesterday we left straight from school and drove twelve hours into St. Louis to visit family and friends. When we were loading up our things before school Tricia reached down to grab my school backpack for me and about fell over from its weight.

"What do you have in here?" she asked, making a second attempt to hoist it up onto her shoulder.

"Oh, just the regular stuff," I said. "Plus a few extras for the trip."

I didn't think much more about it until I woke up this morning and decided that maybe I should clean my bag out a bit - just in case there were any extra things in there I had forgotten about. Boy, were there!

I pulled everything out onto the bed and began trying to sort it into categories. It was alarming. First, there
were the  holiday cards I had collected from people at school - students, teachers, friends. In this same pile were gift cards for Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks, not to mention: the list of people I plan to give beer to when I make too much, a phone number on a random scrap of paper, a receipt from Panera, a Dum Dum sucker, a page from Parenting Magazine about math on the playground, a membership form for the Early Childhood Assembly of NCTE, breath strips, a makeshift ruler constructed from notebook paper, a form from USC I was supposed to fill out a month ago, two brass pipe nipples, and a brass coupling.

In another loosely organized pile were a video camera, Parts of Speech sticker, two CDs from my buddy Tim, an external hardrive, a piece of paper with the name Sean written on it, my glasses, some notes from class at USC, way more pencils and pens than anyone could ever need, a chord for the video camera, a nametag necklace from a conference I attended last month, four books (Clone Brews, The Education of Little Tree, Teachers as Intellectuals, and Schoolyard-Enhanced Learning), and two Time magazines.

The next pile held three digital camera USB chords, two charger chords for a cell phone, a wall charger for a camera battery, and a power chord for the laptop. Why I need three different USB chords for digital cameras would be a fair question - and one I'm not certain I could answer. At this point I was beginning to feel a bit like Data from the movie The Goonies. Data carried all sorts of things in his backpack so that whenever a moment of trouble arose he was able to reach into the depths of his bag and pull out exactly the right tool or gadget to save the day. I'm not certain what scenario would call for two phone chargers but I guess you never know.

Perhaps the most logical pile was the one that held school papers from my students - the ones that should have seen the light of day long ago but became lost in all this mess. There was also a folder Ainsley's teacher handed out on the first day of school to help us all understand his beliefs and practices. I held on to it because there was lots of stuff in there I imagined I might one day want to share with the parents in my own classroom - that is, if I can remember that the folder has been strategically "filed" among all this junk. This pile also held a post-it note and a piece of paper on which I had scribbled: POWER - Intellectual Power, Physical Power, Gender Power, Racial Power (books), Age Power, Financial Power, Religious Power, and Oral Language Power. I had created this list to help organize my thoughts around a photography project I've been envisioning for my students. When the time comes to begin planning this I'll know just where to find my notes!

The last pile held a pile of change, two cameras (one is missing from the photo), a draft of a paper Heidi Mills passed along to me, an excellent article that Rachael Carson wrote for Companion magazine in 1956, a packet of information on harassment and bulllying, and the draft of Tim's short story called Smoke and Coffee - which I read last spring. Just to the right of the items in this photograph are four small photo albums, a glue stick, my i-pod, three paperclips, twelve guitar picks, my teaching journal, and a small notebook a friend gave me a few years ago to capture the things I see.




Missing in all this is the laptop I'm using right now. That's a lot of stuff. Too much stuff. However, just think of the many scenarios for which I am prepared. Two digital cameras, a video camera, photo albums, a laptop, brass fittings, parts of speech, a ruler...

Just imagine the all the tight spots Mac Gyver could escape with such a bag of goodies!