Today’s post is a blog about blogging – does that make it a meta-blog?
I’ll start with my fiance’s reaction when I told him about the #summerblogchallenge – he was convinced that there was no way I could write 51 meaningful blog posts, and was in danger of just spamming my Twitter feed with rubbish – hence the title of this post. I think he’s also concerned that I spent the first day of the summer holidays pre-writing posts and coming up with ideas rather than starting the big it’s-the-summer-holidays spring clean of the tip we’re currently living in. This got me thinking about what my aims are when I post, and why I do it.
When I started blogging this year, I felt a little self-conscious. There are a lot of well-established teaching blogs already out there, and I couldn’t see what I could contribute. However, I’m really glad I waded in, as it’s really reinvigorated my teaching this year, along with loads of other advantages. So this post is for any on-the-fence would-be bloggers who are debating wading into the blogosphere.
Recreation
I really enjoy reading and writing. I was always better at English and languages than Maths at school, and I read constantly. During the life-altering last few weeks of university (you know, that bit when you’re finally going out into the real world), I had a career crisis and decided that what I really wanted to do was become an author. This decision lasted all of about three weeks, until I moved home and got myself back on a school placement, which reminded me that, no, I wanted to be a teacher! Since then, I’ve dabbled with bits of writing as a hobby, including a failed short story group which fell apart as I was the only one who bothered to write anything.
Originally I set up my blog to post lesson ideas and resources, but I found that I was gradually actually writing lengthy posts rather than just posting a resource link and a brief explanation. As I’ve blogged more this year, I’ve found I really enjoy the process of picking an idea, deciding an approach and then writing about it – kind of like a very short story with the plot already laid out for you.
Blogging and maintaining my website has now turned into a hobby for me – some people have asked recently how I find the time to do it while full-time teaching; it sounds bizarre, but this stuff is part of how I unwind and relax, and I’ve learned so many new skills along the way.
Relevance
I was initially quite worried about writing lengthy posts and publishing them online – I felt like people wonder why on Earth I thought anything I wrote was worth reading. Then I realised that I write this blog chiefly for myself, both as a hobby and a memory aide – I post one link to Twitter for each blog I write; if people read it and enjoy it too, fantastic, but if they don’t, I’m not too fussed. Besides which, Twitter has both a mute and an unfollow button, so if people get bored of me, they can always opt out.
Half the posts I write will be of interest to nearly no-one. I debated whether my post about logarithmic thinking and dinosaurs was in the slightest bit worth reading, but I’d enjoyed writing and researching it so much that I couldn’t bear to delete it. So far, one person (and not a maths teacher!) has dropped me an email to say they liked the post, so if I’ve made myself and one other person happy, that’s fine by me!
Some people can write wonderfully concise, insightful stuff once a month, and I love reading well-crafted posts. Mark McCourt springs to mind as an example – his blogs are great. But that’s just not me – I just don’t have the time to sit and fiddle with redrafting. Once the idea’s on the page, it gets posted. If it’s dull, there’s always the little clicky cross button at the top of the page!
Reflection
During my training year I had to write endless lesson reflections – at least three a week, and a detailed one after every observation. They were obviously terribly useful (!) as I seem to have deleted all of them from my computer. However, that process of carefully analysing a lesson quickly falls by the wayside when on the continuous conveyor belt of weekly teaching.
When I got involved in the NCETM project last year, a lot of the work we did was around lesson study and really unpicking what worked and what didn’t. This got me back in the habit of critically evaluating my lessons, possibly with a little more insight than in my training year.
Sometime this year, I started posting lesson ideas that had worked for me – the process of describing these to an invisible reader who’d not been in the lesson really made me think carefully about why it had worked. As I tend to post within a few days of teaching a lesson, the thoughts of “oh I must remember that next year” or “that needs changing” are quite easily accessible in my memory, and those bits do actually get changed or altered, rather than forgetting all about them and making the same mistakes when teaching that lesson next time.
Reminders
There are so many fantastic things kicking around on the Internet now; if I don’t check Twitter for a couple of days, I miss so much excellent stuff from other teachers. Blogging helps me to catalogue and organise this, either through doing a Pick of Twitter post (yeah, I know I’ve not done one for ages – don’t judge!) or collating all the useful ideas from one place, such as this collection of comics on percentages. If I know I’ve blogged about it, I can find the blog page much more quickly than searching through my history or going back to the original webpage.
If you’re a wanna-be blogger, hopefully this post might have convinced you to join the party – the more posts and ideas, the merrier! I’m pleased that we’ve already got two more takers – @mwimaths and @funASDteacher, and I’m looking forward to reading their many many posts!
