My Simplest and Best Teaching Idea I Ever Had

In my first two years of teaching, I noticed that I was wasting a great deal of time every week passing out papers. Every teacher knows that idle students mean trouble, so I either had to give the students busy work while I passed out papers, or I had to do it fast, hoping that the students would not resort to spit balls.

My solution? At the beginning of my third year of teaching, I asked all of the students to bring cereal boxes. When I had enough, I made them into mailboxes. I cut off three of the top flaps, put them in stacks of similar size, and stapled them together. At the end, I had a bank of mailboxes 10 high and 15 wide on the back counter of my classroom.

After exporting the students' names from my grade book, I color coded them by class, alphabetized by their last name, and imported them into file folder labels. Each student had his or her own mailbox in my classroom.

If I had graded papers to return, they just went into the mailboxes. Happily, students' grades were more private so that a student with a very low or very high grade on a test did not feel self conscience. If I had an assignment or project instructions to distribute, they would go in the mailboxes, and I could be confident that each student had a copy. I made sure to have multiple hole punchers and recycling bins nearby so that students could put papers in the proper place.

The last unexpected benefit was that students who caused delays in class because of minor discipline issues or tardiness could make up for my wasted time by stuffing mailboxes after school.

A few years later, my cereal box idea was so successful that the school bought me more permanent paper organizing boxes. They looked a little more professional, but they lacked that DIY charm of the cereal boxes.