When I decided to do the daily posting for May again, one of my first ideas was to find someone to be a guest writer. Since my friend Betsy writes a blog, she was a natural first choice. If you’re a teacher who does anything related to language arts and you haven’t read her blog, you’re missing out. Betsy is one of the apex predators of the Language Arts teacher world, and if you read her blog you might understand why this is true: Even with the wealth of background knowledge and experience she brings into the classroom, she’s always trying to find ways to do things better. She started her blog “Literary Pathways” because she felt that as someone who teaches writing, she should be more of an active writer herself. Which isn’t to say she’s brand new to writing: She’s a fellow veteran of National Novel Writing Month and has hit the 50,000-word mark each of the three times she chose to participate. (But good luck getting her to let you read anything she wrote -- I haven’t been able to crack through that wall yet.)
I’ve known Betsy for some twenty years. She was one of the people who’d take care of my dog for me if I was out of town, and I was her son’s fifth grade teacher. I’ve had lunch with her at least three times a week for the past eight months. She is one of my personal and professional sounding boards. In exchange for writing a guest post for me, I agreed to write a guest post for her on Literary Pathways, which you can find through a link at the end of her post. Enjoy, and try to learn something -- you might get some Quist points out of it.
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I started my blog last summer, and it was really because of one word: Twitter.
I had signed up for a Twitter account a summer or two ago because we were getting some iPads at school, and I wanted some ideas about how to use them. Somewhere I had read that there were lots of good ideas about technology and schools floating around on Twitter, so I signed up and started following tech folks, which then led to following other people in education.
Last summer I started noticing that many of the Tweets I was reading urged teachers to blog about what they were doing in the classroom as a way of reflecting on their practice. I ignored it for a while, but as the summer went by and I started feeling like I needed something new to invigorate my twenty-one years of teaching, I came back to the idea of writing a blog. I wanted it to be practical things another teacher could use, since that’s what I generally find the most useful.
So I emailed my friend Tom, a fellow teacher who had been blogging for a while, and told him what I wanted to do. He had loads of good suggestions, and was very encouraging, and with his help I launched my blog, Literary Pathways. (He was so helpful that he even provided the name when I was stumped).
Has it helped me reflect? I think it has; I know I find myself trying new things in my classroom and wondering how I can tie them into a blog post. I’ve enjoyed getting feedback from other teachers, and sometimes even friends from high school, who read my blog via Facebook, will comment. I’m always tickled that people not in education would take the time to read it.
As I continue the blog, I’d love to have more people commenting and sharing what they do in their classrooms. I’m looping up to my first new grade level in thirteen years next year, moving from fourth grade to fifth with my same group of students, and I know there will be many opportunities to try new strategies out with them, as well as new curriculum for me. I’m hoping to incorporate a lot more technology into their independent work time, and if others have done that, I’d love to hear about it. I’m excited for more blogging opportunities – I started out with one per week, but after our winter break, and then our numerous days off due to cold this winter, I think I’ve reduced my output to about one blog post per month. A new grade level should be just what I need to get back in the weekly blogging habit.
If blogging is something you’ve rolled around but never tried, maybe this is the summer to do it!
Literary Pathways
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