What Now?

Musing again on pseudonymity

I've been thinking lately about reframing my blog so that I wouldn't really care if colleagues knew I had a blog. I still don't want to put my name on the blog so that students don't track it down (not that I spend much time bitching about students, I think, but I do try to keep them out of my personal life), and I would keep the TypePad feature of not having the blog searchable by Google, but I would eliminate some of my more specific grumbling and would relax about folks from FGS stumbling across the blog.

Really this is about my recognizing that I'm already blogging with enough specificity that my pseudonymity  would be blown in an instant if anyone from FGS stumbled across the blog. For awhile I was trying to talk about separate things on Facebook and the blog, but that got kind of annoying and hard to keep track of, so I've gotten very sloppy about that and will now often refer to the same event on the same day in both locations. And there are some specific things that I would have liked to blog about but didn't because they seemed a little too unusual, and it would be lovely not to worry about that and just blog away. Plus there are things such as blogging about my Dangerous Word essay that are distinctive enough that it's silly for me to maintain the illusion of anonymity.

And actually, the only reason that it would make me unhappy to be discovered by my colleagues is that I have sometimes bitched about someone at school -- but really only about a few folks, since for the most part I actually like my colleagues and my job and get along pretty well. Now, it would in fact be a loss not to be able to talk frankly when the shit hits the fan at school, as it will occasionally do in even the best of places, and it was a great comfort to be able to blog in May about the interpersonal drama within the department. But it's also true that just this March I blogged about wanting to do less bitching and moaning in general and about colleagues specifically -- a resolution I broke only two months later -- and maybe being more open about my identity would keep me more honest. And, really, it's not like I'm still at St. Martyr's, where things were truly dire; life at FGS is pretty darned good most of the time, and maybe complaining freely on my blog interferes with my being as regularly grateful as I should be. At the same time, I take seriously Jackie's experience of not being able to blog about some of the more difficult parts of her life, although maybe I'd have a middle ground of sorts between anonymity and publishing under my name. I think of folks such as Another Damned Medievalist, who doesn't have her name on her blog but whose identity is known to some folks at her school; but maybe that is constraining sometimes?

Here's my bigger concern, actually: I worry that I might not have enough interesting things to say if I'm not griping and groaning! And if that's the case, what does that say about me and my life? Honestly, this worry is the biggest obstacle in my way to more transparent blogging. But maybe being forced to find things to blog about that don't involve day-to-day bitching might inspire me to lift myself out of the quotidian and take the broader view occasionally.

If I do decide to take this route, I think I'll need to go back through my archives and remove a few grumbling posts and modify a few others; what do you think the professional ethics of such a move are, since I'm sort of rewriting history then? And what other issues have I not thought through in contemplating this slight shifting of my blogging identity? (I have already for years been trying to blog such that it doesn't affect D. and her professional identity, so I think any change I make won't affect her particularly.)

In a way, it's funny to be wrestling with this issue now when I've been blogging for almost 6 years, but of course my life has changed a lot in these last 6 years, so maybe it makes sense to keep revisiting my authorial decisions.

Wow, I'm good at pseudonyms!

Okay, you know how I occasionally bitch about my colleague, Dead Poets Society teacher? Nice enough guy whose pedagogy makes me crazy and whose philosophy of "students should only write personal essays" makes life much more difficult for everyone else in the department?

Well, today I found out that he's the advisor for a new student group that gathers occasionally to read poetry. They call themselves ... wait for it ... the Dead Poets Society!

I just about fell out of my chair when I found out. Of course, I'm totally in favor of students getting together to read their favorite poets, and he's probably a good advisor to them (although he told me that they have little interest in his advice, so he may be an advisor in name only), but I can't stop chuckling about their name.

I'm better than I thought at coming up with pseudonyms!

Uff da

On the plane last Thursday night, MW and I talked about our blogs and how hard it was to keep interesting posts going in the first year of a new job. It's not that there aren't things to say, but one is so very busy, making everything up from scratch in the job, and one gets so gosh-darned tired.

Take tonight.

I was awake at 4:30 this morning, fretting about the American lit exam I had to finish writing by noon. I made that deadline, and then had to prep classes, which wasn't really so hard but was just one other thing to do, especially on Tuesdays, when I teach five -- count 'em, five! -- classes. (That's actually the only day on which I have this load; I really don't love Tuesdays!) And then there was the special exam to write with another teacher for a student who switched from one course to another mid-term; that was another half an hour. Plus the meeting this morning from 7:15 to 7:45 a.m. (and how scary is it that I've joined a world in which such meetings are slightly but not remarkably unusual?). And then there was the mild annoyance of the afternoon; the English department was supposed to have a collective photo taken by the yearbook staff, but only two of us remembered to show up! (Honestly, what is wrong with these people? Is a calendar really such a hard technology to master?) So now we have to meet before 8:00 a.m. classes tomorrow to get the photo taken then.

So by the time I got home at 5:00, I was completely worn out. I was looking at an evening of grading ahead, but I could barely keep my eyes open. So instead of hitting the books I hit the hay. I put on my pajamas and crawled into bed, barely staying awake through "Barefoot Contessa" and then falling fast asleep for over an hour. (The scary thing is that I then woke up to Rachel Ray screeching about "sammies.")

I'm feeling much, much better now, but post-nap I'm relaxed and only want to veg in front of the TV. It's now 8:30, and I have yet to grade a single Scarlet Letter test or a single Jane Eyre essay rewrite. The former at least must happen tonight, so I guess I'd better buckle down.

So when, on a schedule like this, are the interesting blog posts going to happen? I worry that I've devolved into a litany of "I'm so, so tired" complaints, which is tedious. And interesting things do happen, I swear! And I do occasionally have interesting thoughts!

I may have to start blogging at work. I normally think of that as a "no no," especially on networked computers (although does that actually make a difference? I'm not sure), but that's when I'm more alert and interesting, whereas I'm tending to collapse once I get home. Hmm.

Exhaustion aside, I am really liking my job, and I keep thinking that everything will get better as soon as I get past the next deadline, that an easier time is right around the corner. And maybe when that elusive time comes, the blogging will get better as well.

Blogger loveliness

What a fabulously lovely weekend, with so much blogger goodness!

On the second leg of my flight to Conference City, whom should I wind up sitting next to but Medieval Woman! We had never met, so it was somewhat extraordinary that we figured out who the other was. I honestly rarely strike up conversations with people on airplanes -- I'm not one of those chatty passengers whom other travelers loathe -- but we exchanged a few words in the settling-in phase of looking for seatbelts and the like, and then she pulled out a medieval text, and I said, "I don't suppose you're on your way to Conference?" and she said yes, she was, and that she taught at Such-and-Such University, and I said, "Wait a minute, are you MW?" and she looked at me suspiciously, as one would, and I said, "I'm What Now?" And we spent the next hour chattering away, no doubt annoying the people around us who were hoping for peace and quiet on the plane. What a delightful beginning to the weekend!

And then T.E. and I roomed together for the conference, and that has been totally fabulous. She has the perfect approach toward conferences, one which as a matter of course includes scheduled naps in the afternoon. So this has been one of the most relaxing conferences I've been to, and I'm actually feeling more rested after this weekend of conferences and travel than before, which is the opposite of what usually happens. T.E. is one of those blogger friends who has become a real-life friend, so it's been wonderful to have plenty of time for relaxed conversation rather than having to squeeze everything we want to say into a couple of hours. We had to run out for a quick shopping trip on Thursday morning (both of us having forgotten some necessary items back home), and as we were standing at the counter, laughing over something or other, the clerk asked us, "Are you two sisters?" So there you go.

And then last night we had the blogger dinner extraordinaire! Flavia came over about an hour before we went to dinner, and so we got some serious conversation  time in, although I'm greedy enough to have wanted even more time with her, since she's another blogger who feels like a real-life friend. And then Medieval Woman and heu mihi and a grad school friend of theirs came over, and the six of us descended on a local Indian restaurant and spent a couple of delightful hours in sometimes raucous and always interesting conversation. As MW pointed out at the end of the evening, we hadn't really talked about blogging at all, which she took as a good sign that we all like one another as people and have much to talk about beyond the blogosphere that brought us together.

All in all, a wonderful weekend! Ladies, many thanks for your delightful company these last couple of days!

Blogging and Pedagogy -- A Cry for Advice

Calling on the teachers in the blogosphere -- please help me decide what to do about course blogs this year!

I'd like to have a blog for each of my courses this year, but there are several options, and I'm having some trouble making up my feeble mind. Here's the facts of the case:

Pedagogical Functions of the Blogs

(a) At a minimum, I want to post regularly the briefest of synopses of what happened in class and what the homework is, for the benefit of flaky students, students who miss class (for illness or school functions or whatever), and parents. In teaching at the college level, I've always just followed the syllabus, but "syllabus" seems to be a much looser term at the secondary school level. Plus open communication, or at least the appearance thereof, seems to be incredibly important in this new gig, and a few of my colleagues have adopted blogging as a way of accomplishing this function. Makes a lot of sense to me. And anything that cuts down on individual emails to me about "What did we do today, Dr. Now?" is a good thing. For this function, I'd need three blogs for each of my three class preps.

(b) There's also the real possibility of doing something pedagogically interesting with blogs. One of my colleagues has a separate blog for each of his sections of the course, and last year he used these blogs essentially to create a Blackboard-style online conversation. (We don't have Blackboard or anything along those lines.) He'd post a prompt for discussion and require students to write a paragraph or two in response; students also had to read two other students' comments. And then in class, the teacher would pull up some of these comments and display them on the Smart Board as a prompt for classroom conversation. For this function, I'd need five blogs -- one for each section of my major courses, plus an additional page for my mini-course on public speaking. This colleague I'm talking about had one assignments page for all of his sections of a course and then separate discussion pages for each of the sections for discussion, but I think that sounds a little confusing.

I think (b) sounds like great pedagogy, and I also think it sounds like a lot of work. I've never used blogging for a class before, and of course I've never (this spring and summer aside) taught secondary school before either. And the more I think about it, the more I'm reluctant to embark on a new pedagogical use of technology at the same time that I'm embarking on an entirely new context for my teaching. So at the moment my thought is to make sure that I have a technological situation in which I can do (a), while reserving the option for adding (b) later in the year or maybe for next year.

(c) A third option, one that seems easier to adopt mid-year than (b), would be to have students create their own blogs through Blogger. I could then give them writing assignments and the requirement to read others' blogs, although I think it would be more work for me to keep up with than option (b) in which they're all commenting on the same blog. Additional issue: do I need to protect all of these under-18 girls from creepy Internet predators, and if so, how would I do that?

An important fact I just remembered: One other consideration in all of this is that FGS has very clear guidelines for how much homework the girls are supposed to have per week for each class. And this is going to be a major change for me: I'll have the students in class for more time per week --  195 minutes, as opposed to the 150 I'm used to -- and yet they'll do less homework for me; the homework guideline is no more than 180 minutes per week, whereas I used to tell my college students to anticipate two hours of homework for every hour in class (which most of them never even came close to, I should hasten to add). So I need to make careful decisions about what homework I'm giving, and given the amount of reading I want us to do and the papers they need to write, is blogging really the best use of their precious homework minutes? I'm not sure.

The Technological Options (or, Blogging Platforms and Their Costs)

Fabulous Girls' School does not have designated web space for teachers, so here are the blogging platform options as I see them:

(1) Use Blogger for free. Upside: Um, free. Plus, as many blogs as I want because, hello, free! Downside: Has in the past been less reliable than Typepad, but maybe that's changed. Question: I have been away from Blogger for a couple of years now, so I'm not sure what its capabilities are and aren't; can I easily post assignment sheets that students could upload, for example?

(2) Hopping onto my department  chair's Typepad account. She has one of those $14.95/month accounts that allows a single author to have as many blogs as he or she wants, and she is more than happy to have me have blogs on her account. Upside: No cost to me. Last year she paid for her own Typepad account, and this year the cost is coming out of the department budget. (Sidebar: The department budget is a mystery to me, and I think it's very strange that the department is paying for her blog and maybe for one other teacher's -- that part is even less clear to me -- but not offering this to everyone, although any of us can hop on to her blog. I'll be interested to learn the workings of this budget and perhaps having a voice in its preparation for next year.) Another upside: I can have as many of these blogs as I want. Downside: I have to use her account, which means her last name is in the URL and that I'm futzing around in her Typepad account. She and I are both entirely trustworthy, so that's not an issue, but it does feel weird to me. And I can anticipate having some technical problems on the blogs with two different authors posing as one, although I don't know enough to know what those problems might actually look like.

(3)  Having my own Typepad account. (This would, of course, have to be separate from my What Now account!) Upside: I know the technology already, and anything I don't know D. certainly will. Downside: I have to pay for it. Maybe at the end of the school year there would be some leftover funds in the budget that I could ask as reimbursement, but I wouldn't count on it. And it would be a tax-deductible expense, but I doubt that I'll have enough of such costs to itemize my professional expenses, so it doesn't actually matter much. The cost options are two:

(3a) The three-blog deal, which is $8.95 per month. This is enough for pedagogical function (a) above.

(3b) The unlimited blog deal, which is $14.95 per month. I'd need this option for pedagogical function (b) above.

I can switch between (3a) and (3b), since Typepad allows one to sign up with one deal and later switch to another.

Password -- To Protect or Not to Protect? That is the Question

Finally, I need to decide how private these blogs should be. If I took the Typepad option, I could make it non-Google-able; I don't think that option exists on Blogger. And for any of the above options, I could create a password. Maybe that would be important if I chose pedagogical function (b) and was having students write on the blog, but if it's just giving out assignments and things, need this be so private? And if I go with option (c) and each of the students winds up with her own blog, could the students really keep track of one another's passwords?

And Here's Where You All Come In

Any advice? Particularly:

• Is it sound reasoning to stick with pedagogical function (a) in my first venture into this brave new world of secondary school teaching? Or is it worth the extra effort and learning curve to jump right into functions (b) or (c) from the get-go? Or should I decide against (b) and (c) because there are better uses of the students' limited homework time?
• Should I pay for the blogging platform I use? If not, should I go with (1) the Blogger option or (2) the department chair's Typepad account?

I need to make up my feeble mind about all of this by Tuesday so that I can have the blogs up and ready to go when classes start on Wednesday. I appreciate your help!

Wow (and Crap!)

Here's how powerful "blogging the lost" is:

I woke up this morning in a panic about our taxes and decided to buckle down today and start working on them. But I couldn't find last year's taxes anywhere! Not in the file drawer where they'd belong if only I were the organized person I used to be. Not on any of the flat surfaces in the apartment where things do tend to pile up now that I'm no longer the organized person I used to be. Nowhere.

Granted, I've done a heck of a lot of sorting and tossing and recycling in my search for this file. And there's a whole file drawer now empty and a whole corner of the study that is now pile-less. But no taxes.

Finally I decided to follow the wisdom of the blogosphere and blog about the thing that was lost in order that it might be found. (So this is kind of a secular, electronic St. Anthony, I guess?)

And lo and behold, on my way to the computer, what should I spy but a little pile of papers I hadn't seen before, and right there in the midst of them was last year's taxes! It was apparently enough to *intend* to blog the lost, without even having to get to the computer!

Now, who knows why the file was in that pile, and I solemnly pledge to put both last year's and this year's taxes safely away in the appropriate file drawer once I'm done with them, but at the moment I'm concentrating more on this wonderful feeling of relief.

Okay, having found last year's file, it's time to tackle this year's. Sigh. We have incredibly complicated taxes, D. and I, such that you'd think we had a heck of a lot more money than we do.

E.T.A. Crap! On closer inspection, I realize that the file contains my taxes from last year's but not D.'s. So the search continues. Apparently one does need to actually go ahead and blog the lost after all; intention is not enough.

The Joy of Archives

...reading blog archives, that is.

I have this weird thing where I find it difficult to start reading blogs in medias res. So when I discover a new blog, I usually go back and read through its entire archive if it's not too extensive. This was easier a couple of years ago, when more blogs were in nascent stages; now, when I "discover" a blog, sometimes it's been going for over a year or two, which makes a thorough reading of archives a little overwhelming. But somehow I find it difficult to comment on a blog if I haven't read it all -- some weird academic compulsion or something, although of course my grad school training equipped me quite well to discuss texts and authors whom I haven't thoroughly read. (I've been teaching the dissertator whom I'm coaching to "fake it," which she somehow never learned; can you imagine, she actually thought she had to have read an entire book or article before she could cite it! The horror!)

Anyway, back to the commenting: I find it difficult and socially awkward to comment on a blog for the first time; it's like walking up to a table of people in a cafeteria and asking if you can join them. So maybe reading the archives is a kind of "doing my homework" and finding out about a person before commenting. But then it's weird to know so much about a person (via his or her archives) without having introduced myself, as it were. I've spoken with other bloggers who don't have this awkwardness-of-commenting problem, so perhaps it's just my own social backwardness. (And once again we see why WN does not shine at conferences. Or at coffee hour after church. Or at parties. Or pretty much any gathering where I don't already know everyone.)

But, back to the archives point -- if I find a new blog that I'd like to read, I add it to my aggregator (in my case, NetNewsWire) but I usually don't start actually reading it until I have the opportunity to go through the archives. Depending on how long the blog has been active, this can take some time, and I like to do it in a compressed period of time (although not necessarily in one sitting). So I carve out some time and curl up and read all the way through. I've realized that this is essentially what I used to do when I did more reading for fun; I'd wake up Saturday morning and spend a few hours with the novel I'd checked out of the library. For better or worse, I do much less of that now, but it's not really that blogging has taken the place of that kind of reading; I wasn't doing much reading for fun anyway, and now at least I read blogs!

Anyway, reading through archives is such an interesting experience because stories unfold before me in a more compressed way; it really is more like reading a novel (one with no ending), whereas keeping up with a blog is like hearing about a friend's daily adventures -- both good experiences, but quite different. A year or so ago, when several bloggers started worrying about the security of their pseudonomity, many folks took down their archives listing, which made me sad because there were all those "novels" no longer accessible. (Oh, and I just realized last week that Typepad only displays ten months' worth of archives, which I find very annoying. The earlier months are still there, but it requires going to the earliest month listed in the archives and then clicking on the previous month up at the top of the page. This is an irritating quirk of the system, one that I can't figure out how to fix. Apparently they don't think that many people would actually read more than ten months' worth of archives -- they haven't met me!)

This is all on my mind because I've had two such reading pleasures this weekend: Yesterday I read through Tenured Radical's archives, and today I'm reading negative capability's. Both lovely experiences, and now I'll work on building up the nerve to comment.

At last: an accomplishment of which to be proud

Right now, at this very minute, there are NO unread blogs waiting for me in NetNewsWire (a Bloglines thing that D. put on my computer). I was just going to read a few blogs tonight, and then I realized how close I was to this unimaginable feat; I could actually be caught up on blogs! So I kept going. A little persistence, a little discipline, and now I've finally achieved it.

I feel a little relieved (no bloggers whose lives I've shockingly lost track of; I'm up to date!). But more than that, it turns out I feel a little sad; there was something very comforting about knowing that all of those friendly and interesting posts were out there, just waiting for the moment when I needed a friend to hang out with or something fun to read.

Fortunately, I know this state of things won't last long. As soon as NetNewsWire refreshes itself, the blogosphere will once again hold as-yet-unexperienced posts in all their glory. Thank goodness!

Blog-o-rama!

I had the loveliest conference day, in large part because of other bloggers. As I've mentioned, timna and I roomed together at this conference, which was really fun ... especially getting to hear "the real story" behind some blogger stories.

And then at lunch today, timna and Margo, Darling and Geeky Mom and I all had lunch together, sitting outside in the unexpectedly warm weather and talking and talking and talking for almost two hours. Delightful!

And then, after the final sessions of the day, Margo and I got back together and sat in the bar for awhile chatting with other conference attendees (and we were clearly at the "cool kids' table," which was fun) and then went out to dinner together.

Just a wonderful day all around. One of my surprises was how particularly fun it was to get to talk to fellow bloggers about their academic research, which is the kind of thing that most of us gloss over in generalities on our blogs (for understandable reasons in our pseudonymous world). But then there were also all kinds of personal talk. Plus the personal connections that any four academics can make in our relatively small professional world ("Wait, do you know X?" "Oh, I went to grad school with him!") Plus discussions of blogging itself.

In other words -- Real Conversation. With people we already kind of but not exactly knew. A lovely experience, and a lovely day.

A visit to Blogland in person!

Today I had a lovely visit with Tiruncula. We had a wonderful time -- a leisurely six hours of conversation while eating lunch, playing with her dogs and cat, and mostly just hanging out on her beautiful back porch or in her living room. Plus, she let me do laundry at her house! Two loads so that D. and I can continue this hotel-living for another several days. Yep, that's what friends are for.

A picture from our fun afternoon (click on the small picture for a bigger version):