Hi, Ho, the Dairy-O, the Teacher Takes a Blog

My random thoughts about teachers and students blogging . . .

I’m thinking about the fine line between private and professional/academic selves and lives. Professor Laura Berry gets at this when she says: “We need a greater blurring of public and private, a perpetual calling into question of these artificial categories.”

She also states that blogs “def[y] categorization as either professional work or personal play, and that is why blogs are so effective at breaking down the false divide in the classroom and in writing. Blogs can make work seem like play and, sometimes, one's private life seems like work.”

Last semester, I had a student who kept asking me if she could keep her blog very professional and far removed from her RL (real life). She wrote in her research paper that she ended up feeling like it was a place for her state her ideas far more assertively than she would have in class, much like “Starla” in James Inman’s book Computers and Writing and like Robert Godwin-Jones argues (Cathy nods and winks to her grad students).

Nels Highberg uses his own name on his blog and Carleton Clark decides to go for it and “risk connection with his students through blogging.” I have frequently risked connection with my students in the classroom (although not as frequently as I would have liked, I discovered, when I sat down to reflect on how much I disclose in the classroom and why). My trepidation about blogging is not the fear of letting it all hang out; it is the fear that my writing will not be seen as witty or sophisticated, or simply good enough by my students. Obviously, some of them are feeling the same way.

Lots of us (writing teachers) talk about the student-centered classroom and putting ourselves on the same playing field with our students, but much of the time, that is lip service. With blogging, I am talking the talk and walking the walk (or typing the blog, as the case may be) and *feeling* it. This blog is keeping me on my toes and keeping me honest and keeping me challenged as a teacher, which is both a personal and a professional endeavor -- which brings us full circle.