At gothamist, reviewing A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon:
Another success of Haddon’s is the totality of your immersion in the Hall family. Other writers, when putting forth an entire complex family in a few hundred pages, will be tempted to lay the stories down as if the reader was a guest at Christmas dinner – with background and explanations and interruptions. But the Halls know everything about one another, intimately and without footnotes.
…It’s subtle, and brilliant, and should be studied as a prerequisite for ever following in Tolstoy’s footprints and writing the great Unhappy Family novel.
At flickr, taking funny pictures of silly things:
And here at home, where I’ve been reading a lot, landing kisses on Stuart when he’s least expecting it, enjoying the sounds of rain outside, celebrating Rosh Hashana with good friends, drinking full-bodied reds, and not thinking about teaching.
Which, incidentally, went really well this week. It’s occurred to me, blissfully in time, that blogging about my students and their behavior or my colleaques is a complete no-no. But I feel (rightly? wrongly?) that I can blog about what I’m learning about myself and teaching and how it’s affecting my new life, so I will be endeavoring to do that and just that. Teachers out there, your opinions?
What I haven’t been doing lately, much to Shana’s and my chagrin: writing. I know, I know. But between the short-term but intense copy-editing (only one more week) and the teaching, it has been necessarily simmering on the back burner. Will I ever learn to balance all these plates?
But for now, there is dinner and there’s a movie and there’s that full-bodied red I mentioned.
Unless you are going to blog anonymously, big no-no to talk about your students or your teaching life.
There is an article about teacher blogs in this week’s USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2006-09-17-teacher-blogs_x.htm
If you are not going to be snarky, but just talk about what you have learned, it’s fine. But really- how interesting is totally un-snarky blogging??
I think that life is a perpetual demented juggling act where there is always one ball that gets dropped and rolls away covered in filth and squalor.
I’d still totally pay to watch your act, though.
I don’t know about the teaching question, but you have made me want a delicious glass of red.
I don’t see anything wrong with writing about your experiences…..
I just started teaching college composition this semester and at my interview with the dean, the subject of blogs came up. I’d written my masters thesis on the potential of using blogs with writing students and the dean asked where I got the idea and I told him from my own blogging experience.
Later, when I saw in my stats my name as a google search from the school’s ip address, I figured the dean had found my blog.
I decided then that I wouldn’t write AT ALL about my job. But, I couldn’t do that. I write about my experiences and teaching is such a great experience, so I posted a note to my students, which included a message to the dean, as well. It was a snarky note, true to my writing style, and I held my breath for a week or two. Then one day in the hall, I ran into the dean. We exchanged pleasantries and then he leaned in and said, “I DO occasionally read your blog, you know. And I like it. So no need to worry.”
Be smart about it — consider it like any other part of your life — some of the aspects are fine to blog about, others are just no one’s business.
There’s nothing wrong with blogging about your students! I wish you would. Tardblog.com, when it still existed, did a great job. Heh. Tardblog.