One of the few good things about moving, which I otherwise abhor, is that it gives you a chance to clean house, to take stock of your accumulations and sort out the clutter. Because we’ve moved so much in the past ten years, we’ve managed to divest ourselves of much of the kind of junk that can usually pile up unnoticed in the backs of closets and in basement storage spaces. This puts us at a disadvantage at white elephant parties when a truly hideous gift is called for, but for the most part, these moving purges always feel virtuous. In our household, though, the big challenge isn’t outdated clothing or half-dead appliances; it’s books and paper.

Boxes and boxes of books and files upon files of paper dating back to college days. Of course, it takes time to sort through all this bound and unbound paper. Because most of the books are my husband’s, he absolves me of any responsibility for pruning my books, but paper is another story. With this last move, we ran out of time for sorting, which meant lots of file boxes traveling hundreds of miles and then sitting unopened in our new study for the past eight months.

But we recently bought some filing cabinets, so I took a plunge, determined to be ruthless in my editing of stuff. As I’ve moved further away from teaching literature, for which I was originally trained, and as I’ve gained more experience and confidence as a teacher more generally, it’s been easier to throw out all the hand-outs, syllabi, and teacher resources I diligently kept from graduate school and my first full-time teaching job. And this time, I also threw out lots of student papers I’d been hanging on to thinking I might want to use them as examples and models. Still, I couldn’t throw all of them away. Aside from the occasional unsolicited thank you card, there’s very little tangible evidence of the fruits of our labor as teachers apart from the work that students produce in our classes. Many of these papers are from before the days of learning management systems and electronic submissions, so these paper copies are it.

I like to think that every time I sit down to do this kind of sorting, I’m doing it systematically, that there’s a consistent set of criteria I apply to the pile each time, so that all I’m doing is determining the expiration date of the papers: “Will I need this again in a subsequent job?”; “Might I want to refer to this document in a future class, a future lesson plan?”; “Has this hand-out outlived its relevance?”

But I know, without digging all that deep, that much of my approach is affective and sentimental. Very soon into the sorting, the question becomes not “what can I get rid of,” but “what should I save?” And my saving impulses are guided less by practicality than by a need to hang on to some tangible documents of periods of my life that are fast receding into oblivion. Take, for example,

1. Papers I wrote in college – I’ve thrown out all my classnotes and such, but the papers I keep, I suppose as evidence of my labor and my learning. Some of them are marked with encouraging comments from my professors, and perhaps that is what I want to preserve as much as my own ideas.

2. All my dissertation crap – Sure I have the dissertation on disks, but when I started graduate school, floppy disks were still floppy, and now that even the smaller disks are obsolete, the hard copy may outlive whatever electronic form the dissertation takes in years to come. But I’ve also saved the drafts, the partial drafts, the notes, and all the articles and book chapters that I used or thought I might use in composing the damned thing. Sometimes it’s painful to look at this stuff, especially since the final product is not something I’m all that proud of. I mean, there are parts of it that I think are good, but as a whole, all I see are the holes. But there it sits, in four or five bulging folders that I can’t bring myself to rifle through.

3. Student evaluations – I have evaluations dating back to the first composition classes I taught in graduate school. Of course, earlier on, when I was actively applying for academic jobs I needed these as evidence of my teaching. But this time around, I could very well have thrown out many years’ worth of evaluations, maybe just keeping the summary data. But it’s hard to let go of all those anonymous student voices telling me the things they learned in my classes and how much I helped them. Maybe it’s pathetic to hang on to these tokens of affirmation, but again, they’re one of the few things a teacher has to point to and say, “I made that.”

4. Files from my last job – And there are many, many of these, most of which I will probably never need to look at again. But the work is still too fresh for me to dump. Even though most of these files live on in electronic form, I stuffed them into boxes and brought them along, and I haven’t yet felt like sitting down to sort them.

So, what else does this list of things show other than that I’m a total sap? Maybe I imagine that at the end of my life, there will be some accounting of what I’ve done with my time. And each sorting session is another opportunity to curate the archives of my jagged professional life and keep alive the hope that what I did actually mattered.

What do you save in your personal archives, and why?