What do you do with student papers and bluebooks? I have a few boxes full of such things and there's no available space for keeping them any longer. However, as I imagine throwing them away into a dust box and they would get smeared with dirt, I feel very bad. I know this moral dilemma is purely my fantasy, because what my students cared about was the grade and not these material objects. Could it happen that they would get angry, knowing that I had thrown them away? But do these things in which hours of student labor crystallized belong to them or me? Am I obliged to return them to my students because I have no right to handle them? Or they are already mine and I'm free to discard them, because they gave me these papers and I returned them grades in exchange?
