How Honest Can You be While Blogging?
A while ago, my friend and blogging idol, Bud Hunt, recently wrote about an experience in which someone wrote an article about teachers blogging. In the article, which was poorly researched, the author thought that Bud was blogging anonymously, assuming that budtheteacher was a username that he hid behind. Bud corrected her.
Then today I was writing an e-mail to a colleague about blogging, expressing my hesitations about writing honestly on a blog.
I’ve been a member of the NCTE-talk listserve (now called engteach-talk and hosted at interversity) for many years and have always been careful what I post. My thought is that anything I send out onto a listserve or blog could be picked up by just about anyone. In fact, if I google my name, I get hits in the archives of both NCTE-talk and engteach-talk, some of them from years ago. In the non-English teaching world, I also read several personal finance blogs. On those I see some people discussing their personal finance situation in detail, without names but with actual numbers and names of banks. It makes me very, very afraid for them.
So while I like blogging, I always try to be careful what I say. Not that I have huge amounts of nasty things to say, but that we all know how easy it is to misinterpret what we initially thought were simple, benign thoughts.
I don’t know where that leaves me. I like blogging because we can share ideas. But can we ever really share them honestly if we think or fear someone might be listening in? Is is worse for people who are not tenured and do not have job security? Perhaps this is why some people do not want to blog or read blogs. Perhaps this is why it is still crucial that we develop actual, personal conversation with colleagues. Perhaps this is why we still need to work together in departments, attend conferences and still go to meetings.
Teacher Writing Group
Well, since Louann Reid reminded me (and the world) that I have committed to blogging, I suppose I should try to post. I’m not the prolific poster that Bud Hunt is, but I’m trying to post when I have something worthwhile to say.
At the NCTE conference I made a list of projects that I wanted to work on when I returned to school. Here’s my update:
- Work with Jim Mahoney to set up a CEL blog with NCTE.–I spoke with Jim about being a part of this, and he was interested in me helping, but then I never followed through. I know that CEL has started a blog, but I’ve been so busy lately, that I haven’t had a chance to even check it out.
- Finish the article I started on Saturday for Terry Bigelow and Michael Vokoun’s column in English Journal. I’ve worked on it and took a draft of it to the writing group. It’s almost ready to go.
- Enroll in an online course such as this one. Nope, I didn’t do this. I really meant to, but with school, kids and buying a house, I just didn’t have the time.
- Look into establishing a writing group with teachers in my school. Yes! We’ve started the group! I’ll talk about it more below.
- Write a proposal to present at NCTE about our writing group. Yes! We submitted it on time!
- Write a proposal to present at NCTE, continuing to work with Bill and Bud, thinking about our use of technology in the classroom. Yes! Well, Bud isn’t able to make it to that conference, but Bill and I submitted a proposal and Bud’s hoping to be a part of it online.
It looks like I’ve gotten more than half of my projects started, but I’m most excited about our writing group. I found some people in my department who were also interested in writing, talking about writing, and starting to think of ourselves as writers. We believe that, as teachers of writing, we should also be writers. Very much the same idea that if we encourage our students to blog (which I do), we should blog ourselves.
Once I found a few people to help me get the project going, we solicited the entire faculty to join. We haven’t had anyone from other departments yet, although some are interested. We’ve only met twice now–once just to organize and once with actual writing to talk about. For the second meeting, I submitted the article I’m working on for Terry and Michael, one person submitted poems, one submitted part of a memoir, and two submitted fiction. Basically, most of us stayed within our comfort zone. Next week a few of us are going to try to branch out and try something new, so I’ll be submitting a poem. I’m a bit nervous about this–I never write poetry. I’ve already drafted it and read it to a class of mine, but I’m still not that happy with it.
