So Was Blogging to the World Her Only Option?

The controversy over the Pennsylvania teacher blogging about her students this week has unfortunately highlighted a weak minority in the teaching profession. I am not sure this should even be a controversy--this teacher represents a group of people who will probably quit teaching because the stresses soon outweigh the rewards. Teaching is not a job for the faint of heart: it is never easy if done well. It is exhilarating when it works.  And I feel almost as strongly for my students some days as I do about my own children. I belong to them; I serve them. I wish that teaching programs made this clear, that it is is not a 9-month year, that if you do it right, your reflection is daily and the new creative approaches happen in the summer when you have had time to digest the wins and losses. The missteps always become clear right away, but it is sometimes the middle of July before I see what worked and the seeds of the best year ever in those little victories.

So this teacher who felt the frustrations of teaching so keenly and exhibited such poor judgment handling that stress wrote of her emotional defeat instead of the myriad of other choices she could have made. She could have made her blog private. She could have looked for another school. She could have changed careers. For the perception that she and I are the same, I am angry. She did not speak for me. I am a professional teacher, but more important, I have a vocation to teach.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/02/16/technology-us-teacher-suspended-blog_8310984.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7961932

YEAR of READING, YEAR of WAITING

    I announced the Year of Reading to my juniors yesterday. We are doing SSR at least one day a cycle. Because my school is a "no social media" school, I am not sure where this will go--for instance, the first time someone asks me if they can do their SSR on a kindle, nook, or their phone, I think I have to say no.  (it even hurts to type it!) I cannot fault administration for putting safety first, but am growing confused with  the vagueness of the term "social media." It seems to mean different things to different people, and am not sure how far it goes. Most teachers in my school are assuming it just means no facebook friending of students. I get that. I never friended them anyway. I am not their friend, I am their teacher, and want to stay in their memory that way--with the learning they experienced in my class. But I would have liked to start a private facebook page for my courses, which would create a central place for homework and project updates. And they might actually chat with each other about Beowulf!!!! Some of my other tools I would like to introduce to my colleagues include:

wallwisher

screenjelly, jing

diigo, delicious, digg, stumble upon, reddit

glogster, prezi

google docs; google scholar, evernote

aviary, audacity, garage band

reader, bloglines, RSS reader, feedburner

librivox, google books, Project Gutenberg, scribd

wikispaces or PBWiki

blogger or tumblr,  edublogs

voicethread

 garage band

wordle, quizlet

http://labs.google.com/sets

   All of these promote reading and writing, creativity and collaboration. They support some of the fundamental ways that kids' learning is changing. And yes, most of them are social. I have used many of them with the blessing of my school. But the line between useful, essential and dangerous is getting blurrier by the minute. I  am not sure where it is anymore.

   So this year's challenge for me is shaping up to be about social media. How do we define it at my school? What is our mission as we prepare students for their world? I think I need to step lightly, but continue the journey started when I first encountered a blog four years ago and saw the potential for my kids.

This will also be the year I begin to market to my colleagues (not just the poor English department, who hears about it constantly) more aggressively the essential changes that are happening in our students, in our culture and to our futures. I am starting with a diigo group for the English Department at my school. If we teachers bow out of the process that is evolving all around us, we have made ourselves obsolete. They will not need us to learn and we will not be able to teach them anyway. This year's challenge is to take the long view, and know that it will just take a little longer than I planned to lead my students to their futures.

UPDATE: Just saw this: speaks to the question at hand!

TEACHING IS A CONTACT SPORT

  I have been quiet on Twitter the past three weeks, have only skimmed my Reader files, stopped most posting to my delicious and diigo accounts, even forgot to check facebook (!) One week of that was vacation, so I was doing much more interesting stuff, but for the other two weeks I needed the noise in my head to go away as I hold my breath before school starts. And I am about to write a post for me,  without bullitts and and way too long.
  I don't know a teacher anywhere who doesn't hold his/her breath in those last days before the onslaught: I live inside my head more than most people (my family tells me so), so once school starts, I will spend some of the next nine months missing the time to think, savor, reflect, READ, make connections, explore any flights of fantasy that appear as I tackle each new text for the umpteenth time, and generally, let my abstract random learning style take my mind where it wants to go without considering the practical aspects of the time I am spending on non-school work. I am not going to write a book that will make it all clear for every single teacher who ever walks into a classroom. Don't want to.  Can't: it has become clear to me that it will take my whole career for me to develop the wisdom to teach anyone other than my students. And though this is certainly not the attitude I "should" have in this collaborative learning age: I know things my students need to know.
   For all of history, learned people have passed knowledge to the young. Methods have differed, but there it is. I have read anything I could get my hands on for 45 years, and this experience makes me invaluable to the kids I am about to meet. My enthusiasm for what I do makes me invaluable. We had a good laugh during one class last year, when someone asked if I slept. Surprised, I said "well, yeah, but not much--I can sleep when I'm dead." (They did not get the Warren Zevon allusion. Point to Healigan) They all laughed uproariously, and I realized that they wanted to know how I taught them, had three teens of my own, read books they would never read, stood at the movie theatre in line for both movies they wanted to see and the boring old stuff, liked both the Roots and Mozart, cared about punk art and knitted two of the hangings on my wall, noticed the weather change before they even saw it in the window, watched TV (though they do understand my lack of interest in Jersey Shore) and played video games, went to church every Sunday but admired Islam, etc. We stopped for a minute and I reminded them not to believe everything they saw on TV: regardless of the fact that I was getting older and I was living with wrinkles (horrors) and had to color my hair (toss of the head), the truth was, experience and age made people smarter, and THAT feels good. Class got more interesting for all of us after that. Sometimes kids just want to, need to, listen.
   SO.....though I have spent much of the summer getting great new ideas and techniques from my PLN on twitter and the EC Ning and a Way to Teach, and practicing how to manage a social life on the internet (not too good at it. Still a fan of face to face), I'm done now. Teaching is a contact sport, and summer is for reflection, but September is for playing the game.
   Now is for realizing
 1) what can really be accomplished in the next nine months, and
 2) the power that my particular school environment will have on what I can do with my
    new group of personalities,
 3) it does not have to be new to work, and
 4) we all have to have fun AND work hard. Oh, and that as of September, I will have to  
     avoid mixing my metaphors.
  The best part is that I concentrate on them day to day, that the roller coaster ride that is teaching teens just has to be enjoyed. It is a Zen thing: be in the moment, Leslie. Be mindful of this second and love it, no matter what happens.