It’s my edblogative… I can do what I want to do

I was going to write about my recent glimpse into the inner workings of ed reform monster that is TFA this summer… only 4 days since i was grinding in out in a desk, watching beginning teachers struggle with lessons informed by a backwards pedagogy of immense institutional proportions… but….

i was reading Clay Burell’s wonderful blog (which you can also see on my blogroll), waiting for my curtain call to beat the traffic, sipping coffee, anticipating a weeks worth of hard work (brought to you by the wonderful people at ISCA) designing a unit on the Fall of Rome (i have redesigned this unit every year since i have been teaching it, thinking it will be my model unit one day… maybe this year)…. when something in Clay’s recent post hit me…

there are times when i don’t feel like blogging about educational issues… when i don’t feel like connecting the dots in a way that everyone can see… why do i have to be the one to show that all things are interconnected? when i blog about the Joker and Anarchy, why does it immediately have to connect to educational terminology? what if i just want to write about my summer adventures in the less than mediocre housing market, or my thoughts on whether i have sold out part of myself to bite off a little more of the American Dream than i can (or ever wanted) to handle, or how the role of football coach has given me a new sense of urgency to wake up at five in the morning to go pump iron but has also served as nolstalgia for a past that after my father died i had struggled with revisiting…

my blog can and should more often reflect itself as more of a personal narrative… and that is when the ed gears started clicking… not that the pre-homework assignment that ISCA gave me on Silent Spring (especially E.O. Wilson’s after foreword) didn’t resonate immediately with my current reading of the Watchmen graphic novel, but after reading Clay’s blog about how one of his professors assigned them to choose an artifact from their personal lives and write about it…

let’s just say Antero’s suggestion that my students analyze the Fall of Rome thru the lens of a personal narrative depicting one’s experience in a declining empire….
can someone say video blogging?
traffic time….