Should I Save My Old Math Homework?

​I'm guessing that, for many of you, this last week or so was the longest period of time you've spent at your childhood homes all year. And I'm also guessing that many of you were confronted with, more or less, the same imperative I was: Get rid of all your old shit.

It's something I've been hearing now more or less since I moved off to college, but it was something I was able to put off until now, spurred by the fact that my sister bored a hole through my wall and commandeered my room.

Even if the circumstances aren't the exact same, I'm sure many of you, like me, were confronted with a question that's been bothering me for years now: Should I save my old math homework?

Usually, the toss/save equation is easy: Old clothes, worthless camera cords, random brochures and old textbooks fit almost entirely into the "chuck it" category; photos, notes from friends, Nintendo 64 games fit squarely into the "save" column.

But where does old school work come in? I will never again need to graph the slope of a linear equation, and even if I did need to, I certainly wouldn't consult the notes I took in Ms. Zader's class. And if I ever need to learn what parallel structure is, there's this machine called Google and also I would be a bad journalist if I didn't know this basic tenet of writing.

Those seem to be arguments to burn it all, but there's a reason (beyond laziness) I kept all this stuff in the first place. Watching the evolution of my handwriting, the doodles I did on the side, the hundreds of times I autographed my name—is that worth anything, sentimentally? Is a smartphone photo of an old piece of paper as good as having the old piece of paper itself?

I really, really don't know, which is why I'm asking. Right now, it doesn't feel like it matters if I toss it, but what if I die tomorrow? I know the feeling of poring over tons of notes and photos looking for ones of loved ones who have died, wishing there was more. Does my algebra homework say anything about me? If some far-off artificial intelligence computer scanned it, Black Mirror-style, would my clone be any more like the real me?

And what if I become famous? It could happen. You never know. I would want Barack Obama's math homework, that's all I'm sayin'. And I grew up as probably one of the last generations of Americans who actually did homework on paper, which somehow seems significant. I imagine this is how hoarders think.

As I said, I don't really know. And I don't think anyone else does, either. I went to a friend's childhood house Friday. The second I walked into her room, I realized what she was doing—cardboard boxes and stacks of paper and bags and stuff everywhere. She was going through the exact same notes from the exact same class I was.

Before I left my house, I tossed it all. So did she. Then we went to a bar. Not to mourn the loss of our math homework, but to like, grab a drink like normal people.