Ground Rules (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog)

There are so many ways for this to go wrong. And I’m not talking about the Dr. Strangelove reference in the title.

OK, so that’s not the way to start any piece of writing, much less the first in what may be a long and drawn out series. It may also be short lived. We’ll see. I haven’t committed yet.

Public school teachers shouldn’t blog. It’s a bad plan. I even recommended that a friend blog, thinking in the back of my mind, “he’s totally gonna get fired.” (Sorry dude.) His fantastic blog, which I will probably reference from time to time, is right here. Not so long ago, a Pennsylvania high school teacher was fired for writing on a blog about her students. Granted, she said some things I might not, but I’ve had days like that too. One never knows.

In a time where teachers can get fired for internet speech, I have to hesitate putting myself out there. Jonathan Zimmerman wrote last week for the NY Times that teachers are more and more in danger. He also recapped some of the other things they couldn’t do in the past: smoke (don’t do that), dancing (can’t do that), failing to attend church (hey, I go to church!), or frequenting a place where alcohol is served (now I’ll have to move out of my house).

But I’m still writing this.

I must have some good reasons for doing what many would probably consider a stupid thing. And so I’ll put them down in writing, just so I don’t screw up.

1. I teach writing. I don’t write enough. I write lesson plans, grants, soccer practice plans, letters, emails. None of those are any good, at least in ways that I try to teach. Hell, my writing may not be very good in this blog either, but you know what they say about practice. (We’re talkin’ ‘bout practice!) So, in short, if I am asking my students to write, then I should write too. Otherwise, it becomes too much of the old “do as I say, not as I do.”
2. That said, I won’t let current students read this. I won’t link to it anywhere they can find it. It will take some extraordinary hard work on their part to find it, so then, they will have earned it.
3. Now, some of my readers will betray me. They will give the link over to the current students. I can’t stop that. Therefore, I’m not going to write derogatory or negative things about students on this blog. I have no reason to. As my good friend at the BlazeBlog writes, kids are dumb, and teachers should love and accept that. If they were already fully formed in the brain, I wouldn’t have a job. Why complain about them? They are not problems, they are potential in human form.
4. I’m not going to use my name, the name of my school, the names of my students, or the names of my colleagues. See, you can’t ration with irrational people, and I work for people who have shown recently that they can be quite irrational when it comes to things like this. If I rationally told these irrational people that the blog is harmless, they could still do terrible, irrational things to my career. So, I’ll operate in secrecy. Like Batman, only considerably more boring. So, Alfred then...(that’s a sobering realization)
5. I’m not going to reveal much personal stuff. I will talk about career stuff, education stuff, philosophy stuff, maybe even the occasional item from my past...but nothing current and personal. Every year, I have students ask about my love life. They want to know. And I say, you’ll know about my love life the week before I get married, because I’ll have to explain why I’m taking some time off. The same will go for this blog, because those resourceful little punks will find their way here.

There they are -- the ground rules. Anonymity, constructive thought, writing practice. But ultimately, I’ll do this because I think the sharing of ideas and opinions is a good thing. Can it go wrong? Sure. But so can anything. Americans have the right to free speech, and there’s enough drivel on the internet. Why shouldn’t I contribute to the intellectual corner of the beloved Interwebs? The worst thing for a democracy would be for educated people to cease to speak out because they feel silenced. So, despite the risks associated with blogging as a public school teacher, I will stop worrying...and love the blog.