WOODBURY — As soon as the bell rings, it’s a rush to get out of the door. By scrambling to grab your phone and stashing miscellaneous papers into your backpack, students are eager to get out of the chair they have been sitting in for what seems like forever and scram out of the classroom.
In the midst of this rush, you might have a stack of papers sitting in front of you, and what to do with these is your choice. Maybe you reach into your backpack and fish out a folder to hold these papers, or you might pull out a thick binder to file them into. You can pick any option, but the latter is the superior choice.
Maybe the image of a thick heavy binder is unappealing, but it does not have to be that way.
Adrienne Coelho, a freshman at Nonnewaug, chooses folders over the binder, and a large part of that decision is the bulk of a binder.
“You are just going to have this … enormous binder that weighs a million pounds,” she explains when talking about what it would be like to carry a binder.
Although this holds much truth, and dragging around a thick binder seems less than optimal, this does not always have to be the case.
One thing to know is that most people at Nonnewaug have a system. If every student kept every paper that they were given at Nonnewaug without throwing any out, our backpacks would not be able to fit through the door.
For some students, they just toss whatever papers they deem unnecessary, while others go through their backpacks every other week or so, and some might just neglect the growing pile of papers at the bottom of their bags.
Without getting rid of some papers, your folder would be doomed to the same fate as your binder, and will most likely weigh “a million pounds,” too.
At Nonnewaug, students get overloaded with papers; Coelho even says that at the end of the year, there are “almost enough to make a bonfire.”
Thea Oleynikov, another freshman at Nonnewaug, agrees that getting rid of the useless papers, or “clutter,” is necessary to stay organized.
“To keep everything organized, I just throw everything out,” she explains. “It’s so much stuff that you just don’t need.”
By tossing what she doesn’t need, Oleynikov fits everything neatly into folders, favoring them over binders.
Although folders can give us organization, is the folder really what we want?
When you pile up your papers, is just two stacks really the best we can do? When it comes to managing assignments, two simple flaps to stuff your papers in is not the ideal design.
This makes binders much more effective. A binder may be larger, but it is so much more reasonable. Instead of digging through piles and layers of your folder, you can filter through the organized tabs and find what you want quickly.
So, when you go to stuff your math homework into your backpack next, if you want organization, I would go with a binder.
The real question is why do so many people use a folder? Some may find them neater, but I also found that most students need something easy to hurriedly stash papers in.
“If I rush, I just kind of stuff it in there then look for it later,” Coelho explains, describing her level of organization as “chaotic.”
Most students should know that in a hurry, reach for your binder, even if it just is to stuff a few things in there.
At the end of the day, maybe for neatness, accessibility, or any reason, some students choose to carry a folder. Although this does hold truth, the facts are if you want to use something while you rush out the door quickly in an organized way, a binder is truly the way to go.
This is the opinion of Fiona Scozzafava, a freshman reporter for the Chief Advocate.
