Here we are in the year 2024, and this might be ninth attempt in the last 10 years of starting a blog. Video is king, and short form content is the emperor. Yet, as an English teacher, I still want to write.
I’m taking a break from full time teaching while I welcome my first little one into the world, so taking this time to reflect on my teaching craft and help new teachers and yearbook advisers during this break from full time out-of-the-home work feels like an opportunity I can’t pass up.
So why blog?
1. I need to sharpen my own writing skills.
Now three years into teaching high school, I’ve realized that I haven’t written long form for an audience in probably three years. Yet, this is what I expect my students to do every day. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve written thousands of emails and social media posts for promoting the yearbook, but I haven’t had the time or will to sit down and write.
What has this done to my writing skills? I’m rusty. Just in writing these posts, I think about my grammar, punctuation, and the styles of sentences I teach my ninth grade students.
If I want to be on the level of the great English education writer Kelly Gallagher at some point in my life, I need to adopt some of his habits and write every day. This goal leads me into my second reason.
2. I need to find my writer’s voice again.
I majored in writing and actually professionally wrote from ages 18-22. I wrote for the campus newspaper, regional magazines, institutional blogs, and my own blog. Writing was a part of me. I had a voice outside of academia. Fast forward to pivoting my career into teaching, and I definitely have lost touch with my more conversational tone of writing. After graduate school, I found myself using scholarly qualifiers and the verb “contend” in my everyday diction way more than I ever did when professionally writing.
I love academic writing and teaching it to my students, but I’m excited to strengthen my internet writing skills and maybe even get back into writing feature articles by interviewing people. Writing is a passion, and I want to return to the classroom having proof that I am a passionate writing teacher.
3. I need to practice what I preach: Well Read Class Blog.
One of my favorite aspects of my ELA course is our independent reading program. On Fridays after we have taken our weekly vocabulary and sentence style quiz, we spend the rest of the block reading independently, conferencing, and writing for our closed to the public but not our classmates blog, Well Read. (I use Google Sites to set this up.)
My students must write two blog posts over our semester on two different books they read during our Free Read Friday time. The posts can be a Good Reads style review of the book or a playlist thematically related to the book where each song is explained.
I love this semester long project because students learn about what they are reading, and they have a chance to critique works or share their love of music. We practice embedding images or self-created graphics, and students are organically meeting our digital literacy standards while writing for a peer audience.
By the end of the semester, we have a robust database of books my students have read independently and authentic student voice in writing.
I love reading these posts, and I want to make sure that I am not rusty in writing and connecting with an audience either.
I know that during the school year I just did not have time to sit and write for an audience weekly, but if you could what kind of writing inspires you the most as an English teacher? Why that genre?
Let me know in a comment below!