Back on February 3rd, I decided that I was going to make a commitment to blog everyday for a month. At that point, I had already blogged for a couple of days in a row. This was a tremendous increase in my blogging and reflecting, having only blogged a handful of times since my ECMP courses.
I didn’t pull through on my blogging for a month straight, but I did manage to post 13 more blog posts over the next twenty days. More importantly though, I found myself reflecting and thinking about things I could blog about. Things I could share. But, it slowly died off and sharing got pushed to the bottom of my to-do lists.
I think there are a number of reasons I didn’t pull through on this. The first reason being that I teach and as a first year teacher I’m still struggling to balance my time between grading, planning, and keeping myself alive. There were also times where I felt that I had nothing to share, and just as many times where I felt that I had a million things to share. It was (and still is) tough to balance out. Sometimes I felt that some sensitive things I wanted to share, but didn’t feel my blog was an appropriate place. My students know that I use online spaces and if they were to check up they could probably easily figure out exactly who I was talking about, even without using names or specifics. A number of times I found myself 3/4 through a post and just couldn’t finish it up in a way that I was happy with, resulting in at least 10 unfinished posts in my drafts.
I understand that these aren’t great excuses, but I hope that by addressing them, I can find ways to work around them and continue to share, reflect, and learn in this space (my blog). Instead of blogging daily, I think I need to ease myself in and share as much as a I reasonably can. The entire reason I got into blogging was to reflect on my own practices and, even though my monthlong commitment was a failure, I have found myself reflecting more and being critical of the things I do as a teacher. This can only be a good thing for my and my students. Whenever I have something to share, it’ll be up here.
