Wasting Paper.

I don't think that I've ever fully understand what it meant to waste paper until I started at Blackshear, the amount of paper that this school goes through is incredible. I mean, I get that having 22 students per class with a total of 18 classes requires a lot of paper when printing out worksheets and such but what I'm talking about is the amount of unnecessary copies that are made every day. There is one printer on the second floor that all the computers on campus can print to and every time I try to print something I always have to first fix the printer because of a paper jam, and then I have to wait 5-10 minutes before my stuff actually prints out because there are a whole bunch of printing jobs before mine that teachers never bothered to deal with.

Today, I tried to print out some story problems to use with the third graders and of course I find that the printer is jammed. I spent about 10 minutes trying to find the jam...I took apart every part of the printer that I could but it still said that the printer was jammed. Just as I was getting frustrated a hymn came into my mind:

This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through

My treasures are laid up, somewhere beyond the blue,

The angels beckon me from heaven's open door,

And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

O Lord, you know I have no friend like you,

If heaven's not my home, O Lord what will i do?

The angels beckon me from heaven's open door,

And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.

Really, this seemed like a weird hymn to pop into my head at the time but as I kept humming it I realized how much of a blessing it is that my home is not in this world. I was getting all worked up about the broken printer but I'm thankful that my life is not build upon things so easily broken like a printer, I have a hope that is eternal. As soon as this thought came into my mind I was no longer upset about the printer. It didn't get fixed right away but the process of trying to find the problem became more fun than annoying. I never did find the jammed paper but I did manage to get it working again and I'm pretty sure that I fed in an entire ream of paper...yes, 500 pages...before my pages printed but I no longer allowed it to affect my entire day. 

What was another lesson I learned from this experience? Never try to print things in a hurry on a Monday morning because you will probably spend an hour waiting. Apparently, teachers print out their entire lesson plan for the next week on Fridays and when they don't print right away they don't try to fix the printer; instead, they keep sending the document to the printer until they give up. Then, someone like me decides to fix it and five copies of the same lesson plan comes out...each document being 20-30 pages long. I felt horrible watching all that paper getting wasted so I've decided to bring some home to use as scratch paper or to just print the my student's activities on them...the other side is still usable anyway.