Why I am trying again with a blog...

I started teaching in the fall of 2000. Blogs were hot by 2006, everyone was doing them and having kids do them. It seemed this might be the way to make writing cool again for these chat-savvy kids who would soon take to texting like kids in the 80s took to pagers. I fell for it. I'm tech-savvy myself, always looking for ways to bring new technologies to literacy instruction. I had some some scattered success in having students create blogs and in keeping blogs for my classes, but we're talking talking meatloaf success here, adequate, predictable. What I wanted was for kids to want to write, use their voice. And in retrospect, I might know what competing interests dragged the results down--but that's for a later blog post perhaps. This one is about the teacher blog and why I find myself here again, blogging.

I've used blogs to post assignments and homework, post resources and supplementary materials. What did I find? Most kids only went to my blog when dragged there by me or their parents, and when they did go there they couldn't find what they were looking for half the time. So, I quit using blogs to communicate with my classes and went to Edmodo, then back to websites not because I was waxing nostalgic for the 90s, but because the organizational structure of a website seemed better for what I was putting out there for kids. Not seemed better, was better, which is why I still have a website for class resources.

Here's the thing. Blogs should have voice, should be conversational, should have purpose, and perhaps if you're asking kids to write them you should let them write freely so that voice can emerge, not to meet some numbered writing standard that holds no meaning for them, not to write about books unless that's what they want to write about.  What I see now is that in terms of having kids write blogs, you might have to narrow your goals to one single purpose: developing voice for an audience. If a student is already underwhelmed by writing essays and writing about books, why force them to publish that work?

And this insight extends to teachers as well, and also opens up the answer to why here I am starting another teacher blog. In the past few years I had some forces threaten my professional optimism. I don't need to go in to the details about what those were, I'm sure you can imagine your own bureaucracy, your own unrecognized creative efforts, your own battles between depth and expediency. After a particularly difficult meeting this week, I reported back to some colleagues and one colleague stopped by to thank me for a great meeting, adding that he could sense my despair. I respect and admire this colleague and I thank him for how his comment jolted my back into perspective.

When I met my mentor teacher back in 2001 when I first started teaching in a California Partnership Academy, where I would spend the next five years learning about project-based learning and team teaching. My mentor had been teaching thirty years already at the time, but she remained as willing to innovate as any new teacher I've ever met. Actually, scratch that. More so. Because she had nothing to fear and everything to gain. She believed firmly in equitable, student-centered, inquiry-based learning. I made a promise to myself then that I if I were to stay in teaching it would have to be in the same way she did, with passion and conviction. That's why I'm starting this blog, more and more so as the impact of Common Core and the accompanying obsession with standardized tests take their strangleholds. I'm starting this blog to share ideas (my own and others) about teaching and learning. To share lessons and insights that might be useful to others out there looking for a way to keep their spirit alive.