In the past week, I have seen at least five Go-Ports in the halls of K-O thrown on the ground and torn apart. In the course of a whole year, I bet over 200 Go-Ports have been strewn around the halls and classrooms of the K-O Middle School. With this much trash littering our campus, a visitor might conclude that students in our community are sloppy and careless, but students are not the problem; the Go-Ports are.
The tradition of using Go-Ports is unique to K-O, but it needs to be abolished. Why should Go-Ports plague our lives and make it harder to do work?
Students at K-O usually go through at least two Go-Ports per subject per year. This is common because Go-Ports usually get ripped and their bindings often become detached. This occurs because Go-Ports are entirely made of paper with a flimsy plastic binding to keep them together. This binding can bend and become separated from the paper it is holding together. As everyone knows, paper can tear easily, and the paper that the Go-Ports are made of can just as easily rip away from its binding. For instance, when I put my Go-Ports in my backpack or my locker, they rub against each other, and sometimes their bindings rip. When this occurs, usually about once a semester, I know I’ll be needing a replacement soon; two Go-Ports for each subject adds up to thirty-five dollars and fifty cents, which is a lot to spend on materials just to keep me organized.
When Go-Ports are broken all at once, they need to be replaced immediately. At one point last year, several of my Go-Ports broke, and I went out to Staples to replace them. Since Go-Ports are only popular at K-O, the Staples’ employee who waited on me was unable to find a single Go-Port in the store. The next day, I went to buy them at the school store. When I walked into the store, I asked Mrs. Mendola, who works there, where the Go-Ports were located and she said, “The Go-Ports are currently on order. They will be coming in in a week.” At that point I realized I had wasted a lot of time trying to replace my Go-Ports. When I got home, my mom concluded, “Go-Ports are just too hard to find.”
The purpose of a Go-Port is to organize and to store materials, but if you look at a Go-Port, there is virtually no room to do so. As a result, students have to carry around their materials in many different folders, notebooks, and even piles of loose pieces of paper. “After the first day of school, the Go-Port’s arrangement didn’t work,” Anna Cook, a new Form 1 student, told the class as she held up her discombobulated Go-Port. The Go-Port’s paper pockets lack depth, so they can’t hold many handouts or papers. If the pockets get overstuffed, they rip; they also rip if a student puts any books in them. All of the students who use Go-Ports have to carry multiple textbooks and notebooks along with their Go-Ports. The organization that the Go-Port is supposed to provide is therefore lost because Go-Ports are supposed to keep all the materials that are needed for a certain class in one place.
If Go-Ports were made of plastic, they might actually be useful, but K-O’s Go-Ports are not. As a result, instead of teachers pressuring kids to purchase Go-Ports, teachers should allow kids the choice of binders or Go-Ports. Binders are made of plastic, and they are widely used so they are easy to find. Binders can also hold books, notebooks, and loose pieces of paper easily. If Kingwood-Oxford turned into a binder school, there would be less of a mess, and we would be a better-organized, happier community.
- Sarah Goldman