Committing to Maddness – SOL23 Day

So, it slipped out of my mouth today:  we’ll be publishing our Editorials on a blog, where they’ll be viewable to the public.

Huge endeavor — I spent 5 nights in a row copying/pasting/uploading/linking everything and the kitchen sink some 3-4 years ago to accomplish this for my students.  I trembled when I thought about people outside our little classroom seeing our stuff.  I was worried about the quality of my kids’ writing.  What would readers perceive about my teaching?

I don’t know how I got over it… I think I was in denial about the blog existing beyond our classroom.  I saw in on computer screens in my classroom, sure, but those computers weren’t hooked up to the internet — No!  Yeah… I had a little server that housed this little bit of awesomeness and no one would ever, ever see my student’s work and no one would ever, ever criticize me as a teacher..

There’s been an imperceptible and gradual release of those fears — and that coincided as I implemented Workshop as the staple of my teaching practice.

I’ve been in the trenches with them, writing and thinking beside them.. through struggles and celebrating, big and small.  Workshop helped me experience this first hand with them.  Why on earth would I want to keep the hard work of my students hidden?

The kids are excited.  My hesitation is in figuring out how to move the burden from me — loading all the posts and creating this classroom blog full of entries of every student — to them, because I really want to boost that agency. Let them create, design their blog and put everything up themselves.

But that’s the nature of progress as a writer, as a creator.  Every year it gets better.