Remember the Milk

When I was in middle school, I walked into the public library with a list of books I wanted written on my hand in black marker. I walked right up to the information desk to ask where I could find the books I wanted, pointed to my hand, and the librarian stared at me in shock. "You'll get ink poisoning!" she yelled.

Fearful of dying from marker ink, I switched to pens clearly labeled "non-toxic" and tried to find other ways to remind myself to do things. Like post-it notes. But those are easily lost and crumpled and accidentally thrown away. I tried computer sticky notes, but they didn't transfer from computer to computer. For awhile, I had a paper planner that I carried around everywhere, but trying to find the perfect planner for my OCD self is a challenge in itself. And it became full of neatly handwritten notes, with cross-outs all over them, which quickly became a mess.

And then I discovered "Remember the Milk." It's an online list program which can be synced across almost any electronic device with internet access. And you can make different kinds of lists for different parts of your life. (My current lists are "Graduate School", "Personal", "School") And it's free. You can sign up here: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

One of the best things about Remember the Milk is that you can put it on your desktop, so you can see it even if your internet isn't working. For Mac/Windows, download "App for the Milk" from http://www.chrillo.info/apps/app-for-the-milk/

You can also sync it with Google so that it shows up on your Google homepage, or on the left-hand side of your Gmail account. And do a zillion other things with it.

And, my personal favorite thing to do, is to embed it in your Windows desktop, to make everything look nice and clean and organized. Here are instructions on how to do just that!

Step 1: Right click on your desktop and select "properties."

Step 2: Click on the "Desktop" tab in the "Display Properties" window.

Step 3: Click "Customize Desktop."

Step 4: Click on the "Web" tab in the "Desktop Items" window and then click "New."

Step 5: Next to "Location" type in: http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/ and click "OK"

Step 6: Go to http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/ and type in your username and password, and check "remember me."

Step 7: Go back to your desktop to re-size and move around your new Remember the Milk list.

AND if that's not reason enough to sign up for Remember the Milk, you can also sync it to your iPhone, so you'll always have that list with you wherever you go!

(But I still like to write on my hands every now and again, just to spite that librarian...)

Flashcard Frenzy

The first 6 months that I was at my school, nobody would tell me where the laminating machine or the color printer were. Begging my co-teachers to help me didn't amount to anything, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I looked in classrooms, checked supply rooms, and broke into empty offices on my search. Finally, behind a mound of paperwork in a nearby office, I found the color printer, and began the tedious task of trying to decipher the Korean enough to remotely hook it up to my computer. I had to go through almost every single computer in the system before I found the one with the matching Korean symbols, but it was worth it. I now had access to the color printer.

The laminating machine proved a more daunting challenge. I finally located it under a pile of trash and extra signs in a downstairs supply room next to a red machine that looks like it's meant for small-scale torturing. I snuck in with my newly printed color copies when the repair guy (who actually doesn't really do anything but watch TV all day) was out having lunch. But confronted with the Korean machine, I failed miserably. My usually tactic of button-mashing didn't work, and I found myself unable to turn the thing on. So I moved on to Plan B, which was tricking a Korean teacher to help me, as the English teachers still insisted that they didn't know anything about lamination. Ha.

One year and eight months later, I had accumulated a massive collection of flashcards, which looked like this:

This is no way to store flashcards! So I decided to separate them into categories by grade, as well as an extra category for flashcards that can be used for all grades, and one for flashcards that are part of a board game, like Clue or Guess Who?

Inside each box, each set of cards is stored in a plastic Ziploc bag and labeled with a small piece of paper with grade number, lesson number, and general subject of the flashcards.

My board game box also has dice and little plastic animals to use as pieces.

Now, I'm in Korea, so all of these boxes (which my school bought for me) feel awful, like nails on a chalkboard, and have the following picture on top:

If you do this in your own classroom, I suggest a nice plastic box and a label-maker!

Hostel Checklist

Tick-tock, tick-tock. It's 3 am, and you're finally just about to fall asleep. You've been awake for the past 24 hours, because there's a 8 hour time difference in this new country, which makes it 11 am back home. Or is that 7 pm? Is it daylight savings time back home? Do they have daylight savings time in this new country? What time is it really? What is time? But you don't really care, because all this math is making you sleepy...and you're just about to fall asleep...

Then SNAP! Suddenly your hostel room crammed with 6 bunk beds and 9 other sleeping people is filled with sunshine...no wait, it's not sunshine, it's 3 am- it's the glaring overhead lights. You lean over the side your bunk to see what the problem is. Two girls in mini-skirts are frantically digging through their bags looking for a hairbrush to prepare for their evening out. They quickly snap the lights back off, but it's too late. You're wide awake and dreading another 24 hours with no sleep.

This could have all been prevented if the girls had remembered one thing: a flashlight.

To prevent making immediate enemies with your roommates in your next youth hostel, and to cope with other problems like lost shoes and moldy shower floors, here’s a checklist of things to bring:

Sleeping

• flashlight
• sweatshirt (those dorm rooms can get really cold)
• sleeping mask
• iPod/ear plugs (to drown out the sound of people talking)
• travel alarm clock

Shower

• s-hooks (to hang things on the shower/bathroom door or on the side of your bunk bed)
• reusable folding tote bag
• plastic bags
• travel towel
• flip-flops
• toilet paper

Other

• travel locks (some hostels provide lockers with no locks for your valuables)
• plug adapter (check your voltage ratings on your electronics to see if you need a power convertor instead)
• clips (to attach shoes/other easily misplaced items to your suitcase)

And, as a bonus, most of these things will fit nicely inside a plastic ziploc bag:

Travel towels are an  important thing to remember, as most hostels do not provide free towels. Choose a towel that dries easily and folds up small to save space in your suitcase. I like Eagle Creek Travel Towels because they last many years and come with a black drawstring bag to stuff your wet towel in. The X-Large size is big enough to wrap around yourself and walk down the hall, but it takes up more precious packing space.I would recommend the medium/large size for infrequent or short-trip travelers and the x-large for those moving to a foreign country or those planning on spending an extended period of time in one place.

Also, don't forget to bring toilet paper. Many places in the world provide free toilet paper, but you don't want to book the one hostel that doesn't have it. It may result in fruitless trips to nearby markets trying to figure out the local word for "toilet paper" while you resort to stealing napkins from the upstairs restaurant in the meantime. Bring a large roll for trips to places such as India, where toilet paper is a rare commodity, and bring a small pack of tissues for places such as France, where you think there will always be toilet paper, but you can never be 100% certain.

Finally, reusable folding totes are your new best friend. You can use them for everything, from an impromptu shopping bag to a last minute carry-on filled with souvenirs. My favorite use it to fill it with clothes while you're taking a shower, and hang it on the back of the shower door/curtain using an s-hook. There's nothing worse than accidentally spraying all your clothes with water, dropping them on a wet floor, or even worse, dropping them into a toilet. And they fold up so small! An organizer's dream come true!

How to Manage 912 Middle Schoolers

I teach English to three grades of middle school, the equivalent of grades 7, 8, and 9 in America. Each grade has eight homeroom classes, and each homeroom class has thirty-eight students. So 3 grades * 8 classes * 38 students = 912 middle schoolers to keep track of in any given week.

Then it gets a little more complicated- Grades 8 and 9 are divided into 3 levels- Apple, Banana, and Cherry. Last year Grade 9 had a Durian level too, but since they fired all the extra English teachers, Durian class went away. And last year Grade 9 had a "special" class (read: torture the NSET time), but again, that class has been cancelled. So that makes 8 homeroom classes /2 homeroom classes per English class * 3 levels * 2 grades = 24 English classes.

Grade 7 used to be divided too, but again, there aren't enough teachers, so they just stay in their own classroom for English. So 24 Grade 8 and 9 English classes + 8 Grade 7 English Classes = 32 English classes.

On top of all that, the "Movie English Club" meets Monday-Wednesday during the lunch break, and super early on Friday mornings before school starts.

This repeats on a bi-weekly basis.

This sounds like a pain-in-the-butt week to manage already, but throw in the fact that the Korean teachers like to move and cancel classes with about negative five minutes notice, and you've got a schedule that will throw off even the most organized of professional organizers.

This is my solution:

It's a file folder with plastic sleeves. This is great because you can slip pages in and out easily, and keep them clean when you inevitably spill coffee all over it. And, if it's in a plastic sleeve, your co-teachers can't write all over your pages in their horrible non-color-coded-handwriting.

In the front goes a copy of my bi-weekly schedule, which I reprint every week so that I have a fresh copy to write all over when my classes get cancelled, and un-cancelled, and re-cancelled, and un-re-cancelled and re-un-re-cancelled. Then, the old schedules go in the back of the folder, to reference later when the co-teacher tries to tell you she didn't cancel class 3 times.

After that goes my yearly schedule, with a list of every single class on the left side, and all the lesson numbers going across the top. This way I can keep track of which class has already done what, so I don't end up throwing away extra copies that I need, or teaching a lesson that I've already taught. It's a little redundant, but much nicer to look at than the bi-weekly schedule.

And that's how I keep track of all 912 students in all 32 different classes!

Where have you been?

visited 16 states (7.11%)
Create your own visited map of The World


visited 22 states (44%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Desk Disaster

Over winter vacation, my school decided to change my desk. They did this by taking everything from my old desk (as well as my cabinet space) and dumping it in a large pile on a new desk, complete with trash and belongings from the old desk occupant.

An hour and one package of cleaning wipes later, things looked a little better!
Here are some tips to deal with a disasterous desk space:

• Move everything onto the floor and clean the desk thoroughly. This will cut down on the amount of cleaning you'll have to do in the future.
• If you have a glass top, consider getting rid of it. It traps things underneath, making it harder to clean, and it's hard to use your mouse on glass. In my case, the underside of my glass top was plastered with dried up Korean papers that wouldn't come off, which made it an easy decision to ditch the glass.
• Thread computer cords through a hole in your desk or behind the desk. Getting them off the surface of the desk makes it look less crowded.
• Organize your books by size, putting the smaller books closest to you. In a small bookshelf, it's not hard to find what you need, so a size-based organization will make your bookshelf look more streamlined. It will also make your desk feel bigger.
• Hang an over-the-door hook (or command hook) under your desk to hold things like a lint roller, umbrella, and small towel (in my case, my school has no paper towels).
• Give yourself an inbox to corral all those papers that you need to deal with that you're just too lazy to organize right now. If you look carefully, mine is in a paper box top on the filing cabinet under my desk. My rule of thumb is that if it gets too high to fit under the desk, I dump it all out and sort through it. This makes an excellent form of procrastination.
• If it's not yours, get rid of it. Especially if it's in another language that you can't understand.
• If you haven't used it in the past 6 months, either toss it or give it to someone who will use it. In my case, I relocated my half-used erasers, stamps, expired hot chocolate mix, and a mysterious key to the trash can.

Once you're organized in a way that makes you happy, it will be easier to stay organized in the future!

Vacation Mementos

If you're like me, every time you go on vacation your purse, pockets, and suitcase become inevitably filled with every single ticket stub, receipt, and travel brochure that you can get your hands on. If you're the creative type, you justify this collection of paper products by telling yourself that you'll use it in upcoming craft project- it'll be for the new paper mache lampshade you're making, or for your new scrapbook. Or maybe you'll use it as emergency toilet paper at the next rest stop. Or maybe you need it so you can tell your friends all about that swanky restaurant, in painful detail. Or maybe you just like looking at the pretty colors.  However, the resulting mess when you get home can be so overwhelming that you end up throwing it all in a pile in the back of your craft closet to deal with another day. How do you avoid this mess?

Idea #1: Take the easy way out. Next time you go on vacation, wear dresses or pants without pockets. Don't carry a purse. Don't carry a backpack. If there's no where for you to stash the papers in the first place, you're less likely to end up with a mess of them by the end. Although, if you're like me, you'll stubbornly carry them around in your hands anyway until you get back to the hotel, where you can safely stash them in your bag...

Idea #2: Enlist help. Whenever someone gives you a piece of paper, give it to your travel buddy. And instruct them to destroy it immediately. If you're oblivious enough, this will work out quite well and you'll never know the difference!

Idea #3: If you must hoard your vacation mementos, be sure to stash, sort, and store them properly! Here's how to do that:

• Stash: Keep the papers your want to keep in a folder or plastic bag while you travel to keep them from wrinkling or getting destroyed in your bag. Limit yourself to one folder/bag to keep yourself from accumulating too much stuff.

• Sort #1: Sometime during your vacation (pick a rainy day or a quiet evening) or on the plane ride home, dump out all those papers you've collected and start sorting them. (this is the point where if you have an intervention in the form of a travel buddy, she can gather all the papers off the floor and throw them in a shredder for you)

              Things to Toss (read: recycle!)
               - anything dirty, wrinkled, water-damaged, torn, or that looks like
                  trash. Or anything that is trash. Don't keep trash.
               - receipts
               - brochures for places you never actually visited
               - duplicates
               - flight schedules, plane ticket stubs, and anything else you can
                 reference online later if need be
               - that phone number from the not-cute guy at the airport that
                  you are never going to call
               - anything you look at and immediately think "what was this from?"

• Sort #2: Next, take a pair of scissors and attack the remaining pile (or rip carefully if you're on the airplane). Go through and ruthlessly cut out all the bits of things you intend on pasting in your scrapbook (or on your lampshade) and toss the rest. If it's information that you want to remember, make a note in your journal or laptop and get rid of the paper. Don't go through the trash pile at the end; don't look back.

• Store: Pick a clear plastic bag, and fill it with the items you plan on keeping. Limit yourself to one bag. Write the name of your vacation destination on the front with the date and keep it with the relevant craft supplies. As soon as you're finished the project, throw the bag away. Or, if you find a bag with a label of more than a year ago, toss it. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, and do not open that bag again.