Since I started teaching in 1997, I have had a love/hate relationship with copiers and printers. It can be so cool when you have a crisp, stapled presentation ready for 30 kids stacked flush on your desk ready to deliver. It’s even better when the print actually enhances the learning transaction and the standard is internalized as a result.

More often than that paper sucks.

Eight times out of 10 when I get my stuff to the copy room, there is a “jammed” sign on it. Other times it is out of paper in which case I have to use my valuable prep time getting cut on the box and opening reams to load in the machine. Even more frustrating are the times when there is a line of 3 or more of my colleagues all holding their “holy grails” of lessons in their arms waiting impatiently for the one in front to gather her/his business out of the way. Let me assure you, you’ll wish you were in hell if YOU are the one who jams the machine with those lines watching over your shoulder.

I’ve often avoided the copier issues by printing the stuff at my computer. We have Brother laser printers and they often work well. It’s never mattered how many trees I massacred as long as the ink was dark and flowed freely, which up to now it always has.

Alas, printers like people, get old I’m afraid. They need routine operations and recently, two in needed to be taken to a nearby cliff (if we had one in the desert) and put out of their misery. I’m speaking of one-half printing. Sound familiar? Lines streaking? Drum light flashing Morse code?

Today, I had all these wonderful road-blocks to getting my lessons taught. You know what I decided? I decided instead of cursing the printing darkness, I’m going to light a candle. Like an alcoholic in his bliss, I declared power over paper.

It will no longer control me!

I have set down a “what-if” scenario for every paper event I can fathom. I have decided that the wool has been pulled over my eyes long enough . . . paper and teaching . . . I can see so clearly for the first time in 10 years: I JUST DON’T NEED IT!

Van Gogh said art is done within limitation, not without. I will indeed have to get creative at times in order to keep my one-day-at-a-time commitment. My students already have a mother lode of printed material in their texts and their consumable books. I see no reason why I can’t pull this off! Stay with me as I try this path less trodden.

Once again for the blogosphere to archive: “I CONTROL PAPER, IT DOES NOT CONTROL ME!”