Why am I doing this?

Now that I'm here, it occurs to me that this is sort of a brave thing to try. As if students don't get enough chances to be annoyed with me in the classroom, this way they get to make fun of me and roll their eyes at me online to. At least the three or four who actually show up here will. :)

First, I'm doing a presentation on blogs at a conference soon, and I'm trying to create an example I can talk about. Next, I'm really interested in finding out how well people will respond to getting class information in this format and how many people will actually use it. Also, I think that teaching is as much about learning new things as anything else. The day I quit trying to teach myself is the day I need to pack it up and go to the house.

This guy named Donald Murray who wrote some pretty cool books about writing and teaching once said "writing is thinking, thinking is writing." It's one of those concepts that is so simple anyone can say it, which is why it is also so profound that it would probably only be said by a very smart and famous guy who writes books about writing. I believe it's very true. I also believe "teaching is learning, learning is teaching." That, my dears, is what it's all about.

That is what brought me here. I'm doing this blog to teach myself about blogging and about how English classes can benefit from blogs. I've already learned a few things. I know how to edit a template now. I added the links section in the sidebar, and I'm very proud of that because I had to type in a bunch of jiggly looking nonsense to the HTML to get it to look like that.

I've also learned that it's easy to forget how hard it is to write and how much fun it is to write. No one should ever be teaching English who isn't subjecting his or her own scribblings to the criticism of others. I'm not one of those people who subscribes to the "I've paid my dues" theory. That's just a recipe for atrophy. No matter what field we are in or how hard we worked to get there, we should always be far more demanding of ourselves than we are of others.

And there you have it. Welcome to my blog. If you see any mistakes, please feel free to let me know.