Ten-YearTeach's Blog

            Welcome to my blog!  This is a first for me.  In some ways, this experience is very natural for me.  I tend to have something to say about almost everything (my friends sometimes tell me I have too much to say, that I overanalyze everything) and I have a long-time habit of working out my thoughts and frustrations in writing.  But I have to admit that, in many ways, this experience is totally new to me.  I'm a bit old-school, even somewhat of a technophobe.  I confess - the draft of this blog was written with pen and paper!  I am always skeptical about embracing the latest technology, mostly for fear that it will crash and lose all of my hard work, a fear that I attribute to a Commodore 64, loaded with a word-processing program called EasyScript, that overheated and froze 10 pages into my freshman English research paper the night before it was due.  (I had last printed at page 4 and last saved at page 6, and the computer, after being shut off for an hour, had still not decided to unfreeze.  Good thing we still had the old Smith-Corona in the closet...  It saved my paper and my grade!  ...But we won't talk about what it did to my night's sleep!)  I think this early trauma has made me much more understanding and sympathetic (or perhaps gullible?) when my students tell me they're having technical difficulties completing assignments.

            So,what the heck am I planning to write about?  I thought I would write about the thing I spend most of my time doing - teaching!  As I start my tenth year, I like to think that I have collected a few bits of wit and wisdom on the subject (and I know that my friends and family are growing weary of the stories), so I thought that I would try to share my thoughts with a wider audience.

            Besides - it will be a great way to procrastinate when I should be grading!