Why Teachers Should Blog

I've never been too big on Descartes.

That whole sort of essentialist argument has never been for me. I'm a guy who's built furniture out of science fiction novels and travel books and who's played concerts with nothing but a roll of tin foil and a microphone.

So I've never been too big on the idea that things exist because they have some fundamental essence.

Consider blogs.

There is no substantial qualitative definition of a blog. Blogs, or rather blogging platforms, just exist. The quality or essence of a blog is given meaning only via what the author does with the blog and how the blog is responded to.

And in my mind what this means is that I blog and what I blog -- and how that message is received by others -- tells me what I think.

And it tells me how I think.

My own blog confirms my suspicions that I'm not the most polite person in the world. My blog confirms one of my old professor's observations that in many ways my arrogance is my most important attribute. My blog reminds me that I'm boneheaded and tin-eared. My blog represents me not as an edited professional voice, but as a human being struggling to express ideas, thoughts, reactions, dreams, and general b.s. via a means that uncompromisingly allows for the immediate feedback of strangers and fellow wanderers.

And that's why I think all teachers should blog.

A student in my ed class last night -- a young 2nd year teacher in a Baltimore City public school -- said that he didn't feel like he had anything to offer on his blog or on Twitter. He couldn't think of anything in his classroom that he thought would advance the discussion.

It is in a way frustrating that he doesn't realize how obviously wrong he is. But, more so, it is indicative of his mindset that he is thinking too much. To blog, you can't always allow yourself to be burdened by overthinking. At times this will lead you to a scary place. A place without a safety net. A place full of prat falls.

Because to blog is to teach yourself what you think.

And sometimes what we think embarrasses us and we must then confront our thoughts and consider whether there are alternatives.

This is real maturity. Because real maturity is not about having the right answers, it's about having the audacity to have the wrong answers and re-address them in light of contemplation, self-argument, and experience.

This is made perhaps even more evident by the public nature of the blog, and that is one of the foremost reasons all teachers should in fact blog. Because to face one's ill conclusions, self-congratulations, petty foibles, and impolite rhetoric among peers in the public square of the blogosphere is to begin to learn to grow.

And to begin to understand that it's not all about 'getting it right', but rather is a matter of 'getting it'.

We live in a culture that tells us that you learn from your mistakes, yet which continually punishes and shuns those who make mistakes. It is teachers who have the power to change this. It is teachers who have the power to teach a generation that to fully live and to fully know one's self is to fully live and to fully know one's self in the public conversation. And that to be wrong or to come off as shrill is not always a bad thing; because those too are forms of experience and in reflection they too are to be learned from.

And so, we should teach this new generation to move beyond embarrassment and fear. This is not to condone manifestly insolent behavior online, rather in teaching the qualities -- the unique qualities -- of the globally connected public square, we should be instilling in students both a strident determination to take part in the unadulterated public debate and yet have humility.

I think both are achieved through the crucial practice of critical thinking and earnest self-analysis. And no where, if sincerely met with daily conviction, can both be better employed than in the practice of blogging.

And so, I firmly believe that all teachers should be bloggers. Because if Descartes is wrong, then the thrust of our identity is determined not by our inalienable and essential state of being but by the differences in idea and sense that we demonstrate through our interactions with others.

And teachers, perhaps more than anything else, are the medium -- or have the potential to be the medium -- through which students learn about all that which is 'other'.