dwalker

I begin every year with a question to my ninth graders: “How many of you call yourselves writers?” As you might guess only two or three hands go up. They say they write poetry or short story. There’s the occasional novelist . I point up the fact that they are all writers, have been since the first grade. I don’t think I really understood what I meant until now, with this blog work I am doing with Kim and Jeff. My own conception of writing has been fanciful and romantic all this time. Writers are novelists or poets or playwrights, probably essayists, maybe journalists….and that’s it. I have never thought of myself as a writer, even though I write all the time, for school and for myself. So, I am a writer, and I need to practice. Will Richardson says we need to show our students that we write regularly, and maintaining a blog is the most immediate way to do that.
Another apprehension that writing a blog seems to be kicking up is some odd sense of false modesty, which all my students struggle with. “Who cares what I think?” But I have read enough blogs about blogging over the last several days to know that if you have something thoughtful to say about an idea that you care about, someone is going to be interested. In our teaching blogging we need to show that blogs are not personal profiles or journals of our daily lives. They are our considerations on Billy Collins or skateboarding or French soccer or Chinese cooking or Chicago Blues. Blogs have a center from which our thoughts, our interests, our questions eminate. They are measured and considered at the same time that they are free form or at the very least formed to the occasion. They require concise, clear, engaging voice and craft if you want to maintain an audience.

So here’s a medium that is immediate and gives every student the experience of being published. And teacher bloggers suggest that being published encourages students to be more careful about clarity and correctness than they might be otherwise. And here is a medium that educators are very reticent about. Will also says, “The biggest shift is not the technology, not the practice, not even the implementation. It’s the cultural, social shift that moves us from the idea that we must prevent our kids from seeing and engaging with this “stuff” to the idea that says, look…it’s a different world…they’re going to find sex and porn and bad stuff and bad people no matter how hard we try to keep them from it, but when we weigh that fact against the incredible learning potential that the Web provides, we’re going to choose to educate rather try to block and filter it all.”

I think part of educating about the web is to be honest with students about what is out there. They want to see that we are not afraid of the web or its contents and that we can provide respectful guidance to help them decide how they want to negatiate their world. They really want our help.