Why blog?

Why blog anyway? That's the question I ask myself after long lapses between my posts. Nearly every time I start writing again, my writing is prompted by an assignment that I've given my students, when I ask, "How can I ask them to do something that I have such a hard time keeping up with myself?" I see two questions emerging here: (1) Is a teacher obligated to complete the assignments she gives to her students? (2) What are the advantages of writing in a blog as compared with other venues or genres?

(1) I believe that a teacher should complete a fair proportion of the assignments she gives, to make sure that she understands the effort and time involved in the work. When I assign poems, for instance, I think I should write in the same genres because I don't often write poems, and I need to remind myself of the challenges they pose: succinctness, use of metaphor, rhythm, precision in word choice. When I assign memoirs, I need to remember how scary it is to be nakedly honest, as is necessary in good memoir writing (and to remember it's especially scary to share that honest writing). When I assign blog writing, I want students to write regularly and to choose a tone appropriate to the subject of the blog--and to maintain a reasonable succinctness (something I have a hard time doing myself). Practicing blog writing throughout the duration of the assignment helps me appreciate the time and thought that goes into this regular writing on the web.

(2) Which brings me to the second point: why the blog, particularly? I think the blog is the best current venue for timely professional exchanges of opinion and ideas about teaching. When we articulate our ideas for the potentially larger audience that reads blogs on the web, we need to think through those ideas more thoroughly than often happens when we're writing for the classroom audience in a (relatively) safe space. When students know that the English teacher will give them another chance with revising, they sometimes turn in really rough rough drafts. In another manifestation of their feeling of safety, many students will write just about anything for an English teacher's eyes, sometimes confessional writing that I'd really rather not read! In contrast, much of the writing we do in the "real world" is not one bit safe--as young adults have been learning in social networking sites, sometimes to their great harm. So it seems to me appropriate to ask students to think carefully about what they can say for a potentially wide audience of people they don't know personally.

Today I got an email from someone who'd happened on one of the webpages I've posted as a resource for students and colleagues. The sender informed me that one of the links no longer works and suggested an additional link, something I really appreciated. I haven't used the page and haven't updated it for several years, and I'd completely forgotten it was still on the server. This email was a timely reminder that the web documents created for a specific, timely purpose remain available to a wide audience, once they're on the web. It reminded me that writing for that large, unknown audience puts us on our best professional behavior--a lesson worth learning by prospective teachers.