STOP FUCKING PHOTOCOPYING SO MUCH!
This really grinds my ass.
I don't know if I'd say that I'm an environmentalist, per se, whatever exactly that might mean. I eat meat occasionally, but not often. I recycle, on those occasions that recycling facilities are easily available. (Not in Russia, of course.)
But I despise waste. I'm the kind of guy that sops all the juice on the plate up with the last piece of bread. I save my spaghetti sauce jars and plastic bags, should I need them again.
So I want to say this, clearly:
STOP FUCKING PHOTOCOPYING SO MUCH, ALL YOU FUCKING EFL TEACHERS!
Now, I've worked plenty of places that didn't even HAVE a photocopier, but where there has been one, generally teachers just LOVE to drag in tons and tons of photocopied activities, to toss at the students or even just to have in case they run out of stuff to do.
And there's always shit left over, always. EFL schools all around the world are fucking littered with leftover paper garbage, which lays on a shelf somewhere until it gets tossed away.
And so many of these activities involve slicing a sheet of paper up into little pieces, good fucking god, you could spend all your valuable drinking time doing that.
So, some tips.
FIRST: DO YOU REALLY NEED TO PHOTOCOPY THAT SHIT?
Suppose you are photocopying some activity that is essentially just a list of questions for the students to discuss. Might be in the form of a questionnaire -- that's a popular ABSOLUTE WASTE OF TREES.
Hey, dumbshit: why not just write the questions up on the board?
Or then there's some dumb fucking thing like "SNAP" games -- for example, the students have cards with irregular verbs on them, the infinitive and the past tense form, and they match the cards. Whoa, what fun.
JUST HAVE THEM SAY THE GODDAM VERBS! Student A says "run" Student B says "ran" and it's essentially the same activity without all the little scraps of paper to keep up with.
SECOND: WHY DON'T YOU FUCKING AT LEAST SAVE THE SHIT?
Make sure the students don't fuck them up, and keep the activities, and then you can use them again sometime, which will allow you to sleep off your hangover some fine day in the future. Some books recommend mounting activities on stiff cards and laminating them and so forth, but that sounds like a lot of damn fuss. . .
THIRD: KEEP THE DAMN PAPER AND USE THE OTHER SIDE OF IT FOR SOMETHING!
Okay, this one is a little fey, I admit. But I'm essentially a sensitive guy. You can photocopy on the other side of something that's already been photocopied, you know. No really. It's not even difficult.
Or of course you can use it for scrap paper. Useful for all those half-sheets of paper you end up with after the ever stupid "Information Gap" activities, actually. You can use them for lesson plans or notes, or just for doodling on in class when you're bored.
Or, of course, for writing down phone numbers of your female students you want to go out with.
So go out and save some trees. Add some oxygen to the atmosphere. And tell 'em English Teacher X commanded it.