the cat is out of the bag

the cat is out of the bag - continued

Somewhere in the middle of the semester, it came to my attention that some of my students had found this journal and were reading it. If you read back from when I started writing in July, you'll see that I had been worried about that since I first signed my teaching contract.

So when one of them posted a note in my Shoutbox informing me that I had been discovered . . .

I freaked out a little.

I'm pretty sure that I'm the only teacher at my high school keeping an online journal, so that made me a little nervous. I'm sure that posting things about my personal life for anyone to see pushes the envelope a little bit in terms of teacher-student interactions. And, I had posted a lot about my life and relationship with Corey, who is a man.

Which makes me gay.

Which isn't always a good thing for a teacher to be broadcasting.

But here we are at the end of the semester and things are going fine. A few more students have left messages in the Shoutbox (Hi, guys) but no one else has really brought up the website in class. I know of a couple of teachers who read it, and have told me how much they enjoy it.

Other than that . . . nothing. No drama. No fireworks. Nothing has caught fire or crumbled to dust.

And that makes me happy. Because I think this is a good thing. I feel really strongly about that. And I would actually like to see us (as a school) start to use the "weblog" as a tool for both teachers and students. I've asked our IT department to look into installing Movable Type, which is the industrial-strength version of TypePad. I think we could do some really wonderful things. I imagine both students and teachers keeping weblogs, some as tools for specific projects, others for personal journaling like mine.

For me, success in any company or organization always comes down to community. Groups with good community are successful and produce good products (or students). And weblogging is a great community builder.

So I'm going to keep on doing my thing, and we'll see what happens.

Posted: Sun - December 21, 2003 at 02:40 PM

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the cat is out of the bag - continued

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