The Great Decluttering of EDUC 3023: My New Year’s Resolution

‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions. I’ll bite. I always have. This year, 2026, my resolution will be a bit different. See, in the past, my New Year’s resolutions were always personal; and, as expected, they varied in terms of success, that is, how long (temporally speaking) they lasted. Certain resolutions that I’ve made were over in the blink of an eye (e.g., Dry January), whereas others have lasted an entire year (e.g., taking the steps instead of elevators or escalators whenever possible). My most successful resolution (i.e., not to buy any clothing items for an entire year) lasted 18 months, but then the situation, let’s just say, got a bit dire and I had to stop. Going forward, at least for this year, my New Year’s resolution will be work related.

 

As of July 1st of this year, 2026, I will have been working out of one office (EDUC 3023) in the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) for 18 years straight. As one who tries to not take work home with them all that much, the physical evidence of work, that is, my academic career is literally and physically housed in my office. On one very cold, very dark day around the end of 2025, standing smack dab in the middle of my office, I looked around and came to the realization that I had accumulated too much stuff relative to the size of my office. Too many books, obviously. Too many well-organized (in my opinion) stacks of paper, of course. Way too much legacy technology (e.g., old Apple Adapters) and too many mathematics education related material possessions (e.g, old Texas Instrument calculators). Look, I wouldn’t say that the walls of my office are buckling, and I wouldn’t say that I’m suffering from a professorial-hoarding-disorder. I would say, however, if I were a gold fish, and if there were any credence to the goldfish bowl theory, that is, a goldfish’s growth is correlated to the size of the container in which it lives, there may have been a little water dribbling out the bottom of my office door at the end of 2025.

 

I’m not getting a new, bigger office at USask this year or at any point in the future. Cue, then, my New Year’s resolution for 2026: The Great Decluttering of EDUC 3023. Step one in my plan of attack, which I hope to have completed by the end of January or mid-February, is quite simple: address the many, many stacks of paper strewn about my office. Doing so has, actually, turned out to be a relatively task easy thanks to current digitization technologies. For example, I’ve walked certain stacks of paper down to the central office photocopier where, with the push of a few buttons, the stack gets scanned and turned into a pdf file that ends up in my email inbox. Similarly, my iPhone and iPad do a great job of scanning a page or two that I would like to preserve. My phone can also just take a picture of a printed article that I read long ago, but has just been accumulating dust for the past decade. Sure, scanning and taking pictures is, in essence, kicking the can down the road. I will have to download the articles that I once had in paper, but maybe better organizing my digital life is an early candidate for my New Year’s resolution for next year.

 

I should point out that, yes, a month is a long time, but I am making a conscious effort to not go through each stack of paper hastily. In doing so, I am provided with a sense of confidence when shredding documents that are no longer necessary (e.g., hotel receipts from a conference I once attended in 2011 or 78 final exams from the fall semester of 2016), and nostalgia when stumbling upon and deciding to keep buried treasures (e.g., a handwritten letter from Prof. David Suzuki declining my very nice offer to be part of a book project I completed many years ago). With all the shredding and with all the scanning, I am off to an auspicious start to my New Year’s resolution. EDUC 3023 is getting decluttered. At the same time, I’m starting to look ahead to what comes next in my plan of attack, which is where I am running into a bit of a problem.

 

I see the decluttering of EDUC 3023 grinding to a bit of a halt, hopefully temporarily, once the many stacks of paper in my office have been addressed. Unlike stacks of paper, books and material possessions aren’t as easy to digitize. Sure, you could take a picture or a video of a slide rule or a vintage calculator for preservation purposes, but, at least to me, the picture just isn’t the same as being able to hold and feel the high build quality of a vintage calculator in your hands. A similar story applies to books.

 

The hardest part of my decluttering of EDUC 3023 will be getting rid of books. For me, there’s just something about holding a physical book in your hands, especially an old book. Simply put, I have a tough time getting rid of books. Also simply put, I have too many books in my office. Recognizing the former and the latter, I’ve started to devise different plans for different books. Certain books will be offered to my students. If the end of last semester (December, 2025) is any indication, which is when a pack of future high school math teachers took down a stack of old pre-calculus and calculus textbooks that I had brought from my office in mere minutes, many of my books will find good homes. Other books will be offered to other USask students. For example, also at the end of last semester, I began walking undergraduate mathematics textbooks (e.g., abstract algebra, number theory, differential equations, etc.) over to the “take a book / leave a book” shelves in the Place Riel Student Centre. Doing so on a book by book basis allowed me to see if the books were getting taken, which they were, and got me out of my office and taking more walks around campus. A few nice plans, which will address many, but not all of the books that are on the shelves of my office.

 

Less than a month into my New Year’s resolution to declutter EDUC 3023, it appears that everything is going according to plan. However, there remains the thorny little matter about what to do with all the mathematics education antiques, artifacts, collectibles and treasures that are housed in my office. Let’s look at an example.

 

A colleague of mine that retired a few years ago gave me a gift. Yes, you’re reading that last sentence correctly. On the occasion of my colleague’s retirement, they gave me a gift. The gift was not a celebratory gesture for not having to work with me anymore, however. I asked just to make sure. Rather, they noted that they had something in their possession that they deemed valuable and wished to entrust me with it going forward. A very nice gesture on their part and I gladly obliged to take ownership of their gift to me, a book.

 

I’ll be honest with you, my 130+ year old copy of The High School Arithmetic: For Use in High School, Collegiate Institutes and Senior Forms of Public Schools, written by Ballard, McKay and Thompson, Authorized by the Department of Education, and published by Hunter, Rose and Company in Toronto in 1894, crumbles in my hand each and every time I dare to gingerly leaf through it. I wonder about Louisa Patterson, whose name is written lightly in pencil at the top right of the first and third pages of the book with the year 1894 just below. I also wonder whether they paid the 60 cents price which is prominently presented at the bottom of the front cover. Mostly, however, my thoughts turn to the teaching and learning of mathematics in Canada all those years ago.

 

A quick reading of the Preface reveals that the book is designed as a series of graded questions to develop “the whole theory of arithmetic”. I often wonder how a student, back then, using the book to learn about vulgar fractions, mensuration and the Metric System might react to one of those present day trigonometry gifs which rip a point around the unit circle to graph, simultaneously, sin, cos, tan, csc, sec and cot theta in mere seconds over and over. I also wonder how a modern day student, one about to take finance education or financial literacy, might react to the section of the book entitled “problems arising from business transactions” (e.g., trade discount, commission, duties and customs, stocks and investments, bank discount, equation of payments, present worth and true discount, annuities and more) from so long ago. On and on I ponder as I leaf through The High School Arithmetic, but back to the problem at hand, that is, the great decluttering of EDUC 3023.

 

No matter how much I end up decluttering my office, I’m not throwing out The High School Arithmetic. It’s a book, an old book, which means, in my hands, it’s safe. It’s also a gift, which is another reason I’m not going to toss it. It also doesn’t take up much room. Case closed on at least one office item that isn’t a stack of paper or old calculus textbooks. The kicker is that the book is an antique, an artifact and a collectible; arguably, the book is a treasure, especially if one man deems it as junk. The bigger problem, then, is that I’m not just keeping a book, but I’m keeping an antique, an artifact, a collectible or a treasure when it comes to mathematics education. The decisions, then, just got decidedly more difficult, which will greatly impact the timing of my larger, year-long plan for my office.

 

I guess I’m in some murky waters right now when it comes to fully decluttering my office. Getting rid of stacks of paper is no problem. Giving new homes to certain books, no issues there either. However, when it comes to the mathematics education related antiques, artifacts, collectibles and treasures that live in my office, I’m going to need some time before I decide what to do with each and every one of them. Fortunately, I have about 11 more months to get this done. Well, if I can mirror my most successful personal resolution, 17 more months are on the books. In the meantime, should you be housing what you deem an antique, artifact, collectible or treasure related to the teaching and learning of mathematics in your office or elsewhere, Kseniya and I invite you to tell us all about it here in the pages of Education Notes in 2026. Happy New Year.