This is one of those more easy-going topics. What do, you, NSG do with your old school (or work, I suppose) stuff? Why?
When I say stuff I mean basically everything. Uniforms if you had them, certificates, reports (as in school reports from principles and the like), files of assessments on your computer (if you had a personal computer when you were at school obv.), trophies, assessments, and, of course, school books (whether ones you wrote in or textbooks; assuming, of course, you had any). Naturally, stuff could be broader than this. Say, that lump of tarseal you and your mate pulled up out of the basketball court (or was that just me)...
Personally, I've got pretty much everything that applied to me (no idea what happened with the tarseal, I was something like five). That's not to say that I could find you my spelling notebook from year three. I'd be very surprised if it had got binned (well, deliberately) because that's neither me nor my immediate family but it's probably buried in some totally irrelevant area (hell, a book I still use inexplicably turned up in my brother's room under some other books that we never look at). Clothing and footwear are an exception to this as that which remains is basically a form of administrative oversight (the aforementioned tarseal didn't hang around long, it's basically a joke... and it was, technically, a hockey/netball court).
The exception to this state of disorganisation are my exams. NCEA is unique, globally, in that the final exams done at the end of the year are returned to candidates (i.e. the people who sit them). The same applies to Scholarship as well. Over three years I sat a lot of exams so that's a lot of paper to store somewhere (as an estimate: three papers a subject, six subjects, three years so that's 3*6*3 = 54). My initial solution to this was a shallow box but I had to upgrade to a sturdier thicker box. Uni's been mostly digital scripts and some carelessness means I've replaced the only photocopied one, for reference.
Okay, so now the thing that's more interesting... why keep any of this stuff? What good is it going forwards?
To an extent, there is something to be said for having retired (as it were) school stuff on-hand whether it's a later school year and you want to review or maybe it's some random thread on NSG and you want to check a concept that's being referred to without Wikipedia's help for instance. In practice, I probably referred to old books for useful purposes like this more in the latter context as, usually, school's quite keen on refreshing your memory of what you should already know (particularly true of subjects that don't assume prior experience where it is actually rather useful*). But, sure, this is a pretty good reason.
The main reason why I don't get rid of any of this stuff is more philosophical. In a very real sense, chucking out that year ten maths book is completely unthinkable. I quite firmly believe that we are, in large part, are the work that we do. That last minute essay for English: that's me. Those hours of dull copying from slides? That's me too. How could I throw myself out? On a somewhat related note, you've got sentiment. For instance, there's a particular essay that I wrote for English once that I read quite frequently because it was a) successful and b) very different to all the essays I'd written on that text up until that point (and since I wrote no more, since then too).
Based on an enormous sample of myself and a friend, people who do well at school are likely to keep their stuff. Expanding that to a guy I know/knew, the middling-pupil who is both popular and sporty, does not. I don't really think that academic performance and keeping of materials is linked but you never know.
Yeah, so what say ye NSG? Do you keep your old school/work stuff? Do you do so consciously? If so, what is your reason for keeping/not keeping? Are there any further implications?
*Economics, why? Uni, at least for me, has the same problem. History would be like this if individual topics studied mattered at all at school. They don't, so it wasn't.1
