Now as I've already discussed previously, I'm a bit of an environmentalist or as I put it an ecogeek. Now for the past couple of weeks (actually more of the past couple of days) my values have been tested. Unfortunately this semester a couple of my classes require us to put together notebook binders. These notebook binders are filled with papers. Now I'm not exactly thrilled about this. I understand that my professors want us to have hard copies of papers in binders for later reference. For instance, if I wanted to look at a Literacy Strategy, I could just take out my binder and locate it. However, I myself am starting to see more of the advantages of having digital copies of things. Unfortunately, this isn't an option that is avaliable to me. Now it really hasn't been that bad for one of my classes as far as paper goes. Yes, my tutoring portfolio for my literacy class has used a bunch of papers, it hasn't been all at once. Plus, if I took all the printed papers from both my Strategy notebook AND my tutoring portfolio, it still wouldn't nearly add up to the amount of papers I had to print for my Primary Math notebook. For my Primary Math class, we have to have a resource notebook of all the articles and activities we've done throughout the semester. I spent a long time yesterday printing out all the articles and activities from online. Talk about killing trees. I don't know how many sheets of paper I ended up using just to print everything. Just to put in a binder that I possibly may never use since I'm not planning to teach math or even teach!! I honestly can't even look at my binder without feeling guilty. All that paper!! There really isn't a good thing about it. However, it is good that I at least have an unlimited paper supply. Since I'm a College of Education Student, if I use the printers in the building, I don't have a limit or have to pay. It's nice to be able to save some of my printer ink and paper and use the school's. Especially when you have classes like this that want you to print off tons of stuff. Now I'll admit, I tend to have a bunch of papers in my apartment. That's because I'm a bit of a pack rat and don't like to throw stuff away. However, I don't print off things unless I absolutely need to and I need to go through all the papers here in my apartment and get rid of some of it when I get the chance.
I honestly want to know if my professors even care about the environment. I'm sure they do. But things like having us print all these things for a binder tends to make me question them. Personally if they would just have us save everything to a disc instead of printing them out, I think I would like it better.
It's strange how now that technology has advanced so much that we can now have digital copies of things and limit how much paper we use. I think it's just nicer to not have to deal with stacks of papers.
I'm not a tree killer and I don't want to be. Thanks to my professor for my Primary Math class however, I'm starting to feel like one. Go green! Save paper! Don't print things unless you absolutely need to!
Thanks for reading!
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