Things That Ought Not Be -- Part 2

2. Paper hoarding

What is really in the Permanent Record?

Most home school parents have never been teachers in the Official School System. As such, a lot of folks who are new to the process can get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of paperwork home schooling can generate. After all, their experience with being elementary school students involved bringing the papers home, taking back the ones that needed to be signed or finished, then bringing some more home the next day.

But what happened to all of those finished math worksheets, grammar exercises, and science papers that came home every day?

I don't know either. And that's the point.

Early on in our home schooling career, we knew we should keep records. Attendance? Of course. Report cards? Sure -- both on the computer and paper back-ups.

Beyond that, we read that we should keep a "representative sample" of our kids' work. Year 1 that meant keeping one out of every 100 pieces of paper our kids generated in their Student Notebook. But even that was too much, so year 2 we decided that we would either keep it forever, or throw it away. And when the "Keep forever" folder got too thick, we pared it down again. This happened about once every six weeks.

Year 3 we got even stricter. One paper or project per subject per nine weeks. If you want to keep this one, you have to throw the other away. No exceptions. What was amazing was that a) we didn't feel any nostalgia at all for a random Wednesday in February's multiplication drills, b) the paper flow is much easier to manage, and c) now that we've gotten into the habit of throwing school papers away, it's much easier to get rid of other stuff we don't need anymore.

Now to be fair, we haven't had any kids apply to college yet, so we haven't seen the full impact of throwing away all of those 3rd Grade Easy Grammar assignments. But I for one am willing to take the chance that it won't come up on a daughter's application to Vanderbilt.

The trash can is your friend. And he's hungry. Feed him well, and everybody's life will be happier.