Messy Desks

I read a magazine article recently about messy desks. Research has proven that people with messy desks are just as good at finding things on them as people whose desks are neat and well-organized. Messy-deskers just have a different mental filing system. A person's desktop, in other words, is a three-dimensional portrait of his or her mind.

This news came as a relief to the nine English teachers in Room 200, a windowless 24' by 48' cement-block bunker we share with six math teachers. A visitor came in once and asked, "Which is the English department?" Before anyone could answer, he glanced around at the desktops and said, "Never mind, I can tell."

The math teachers' desks are -- well, I'm searching for the right word. "Obsessive" comes to mind, but I'm an English teacher, so I'm biased. Let's try an anecdote: A math teacher (now retired) once asked a colleague to collect some tests for her on a day she would be absent and place them in the lower-right-hand drawer of her desk. She asked him this favor personally, and repeated the instructions to be sure he understood them. When he came in on the appointed day, he found she had left a reminder note on his desk that read: "Tests in lower right-hand drawer." He picked up the tests, took them to her desk, and found a second note on the desktop that read: "Lower right-hand drawer." When he opened the drawer, staring up at him from the bottom was a third note: "Right here."

By contrast, this is what my desktop looked like last Friday afternoon. I've spent the last eight weeks directing the spring musical, so I'll use stage directions: Up center were three loose-leaf binders representing my three current instructional assignments (Freshman English, Creative Writing, Modern Literature). Upstage left was a pile of daily absence lists dating back to February, anchored down by a recyclable "Every Day is Earth Day" cloth lunch bag containing desiccated sections of an orange peeled but not consumed sometime earlier in the week. Down left was a precariously balanced stack of books returned by students (two Romeo and Juliet, four Death of a Salesman, 15 The House on Mango Street). Down center, demanding immediate attention, were  three interoffice memos, a red-jacketed attendance report, and a file folder of college recommendation letters held in place by a cardboard box containing a coffee-maker, a can of Maxwell House coffee, a box of filters, a pound of Domino's Sugar,  11 plastic coffee cups, and three plastic spoons. Downstage right  a ceramic vase filled with two dozen daisies lent a festive touch, along with a Jimmy Buffett parrot-head hat donated to the spring musical by the head of the Social Studies department. And up right, under two tambourines donated by someone whose name I can't recall, was a pile of  materials related to our most recent faculty meetings (competency-based assessment, sexual harassment, the new professional development manual, and "visioning"). The tambourines jingle faintly when I'm writing.