Blogs and comments and reflections: oh my!

I posted comments on a couple of my classmates' blogs today. It was pleasant and, at least the way I chose to approach the task, not too burdensome.

I enjoyed this opportunity in the sense that I had never had occasion to comment on another teacher's or professional's blog or other online written work before. Of course, my subjects, remarks, and audience were shaped almost entirely by my own choice, so the process didn't feel too burdensome.

I was struck by the artificial safety of the exercises, though. We are all teachers or past or prospective teachers, and classmates, even friends. We chose comfortable topics on which to make (minimal, usually) comments. Furthermore, our blog IDs keep our posts from being anonymous, or at least from being entirely anonymous. All these choices and circumstances feel right to me -- I am terribly uncomfortable when people do not claim their public written work and of course I'd rather comment on that which interests me -- but at some level, such an exercise is practice.

I have just the merest smattering of experience commenting publicly, by which I mean beyond the confines of my school's own wiki/blog network. Literally no more than five times, I have commented on articles that are part of an online publication of some sort. I have been tempted hundreds of times; I have regretted it the few times I caved to the urge. The reason I have wanted so badly to add my remarks, the reason I have resisted, and the reason I have regretted (even unnoticed) any commentary I have added are all the same: the vitriol. The two types of threads that I have struggled over the years, wisely, to avoid other than under the most extreme of circumstances are the following: threads directed at my mother or family, and threads that attack my almost-as-dearly-beloved Kansas Jayhawks and their sports teams and legacies. One of these issues is easier to explain and, I suppose, of less moral import. Sports chatter of all sorts -- at the bar, on a radio call-in show, in the stands, and on the internet -- is passionate at best; insubstantial and insignificant and illogical much of the time; hate-filled and slanderous at its worst. My mother, on the other hand, served as a public school board member in my hometown for 20 of the 24 years of my life that stretched from my eighth grade year until last summer. She never earned a dime doing so, I might add. While Lawrence is not a grand political landscape, it is a college town, disproportionately peopled with educated, invested individuals who have opinions. In so many years of work, my mom was, of course, part of decisions with which people, often many people, disagreed; for some individuals, specific decisions remained the defining element of my mother's character years and years after the matter in question was settled. To my knowledge, only one of those decisions was ever just her decision, and it was still hers and my fathers (a decision about my youngest sibling's high school enrollment, a choice I do happen to think I would have handled differently but that never would, under other circumstances, have mattered to anyone). Attacks based on that decision, made in 1997, cropped up again as recently as last spring and of course pertained to my whole family, or at least half of it, rather than just my mother. One of the two times I ever commented in a forum in my hometown were in response to some of those remarks last spring, because I felt helpless and angry and wanted to defend my mother, my sister, and public service in general. I identified myself in my comment, because that seems more honorable to me, and I wrote one detailed remark, never responding to any others. Still, to comment is to partake, and to partake is to support. It's gross to me that I even yielded: it feels like any impulse buy or late night food choice, only momentarily satisfying and then deeply mortifying. Had I jumped in earlier in the dialogue about this particular boundary or budget issue (I don't even remember which), I might have made the SMALL, DISTORTED, LARGELY VAPID ELECTRONIC maelstrom -- see that I have to remind myself that none of it matters a whit -- worse, not better. Even now, talking about it makes me feel like I need to take a shower.

Lesson: never comment...

...on that sort of discussion board. But these happy teacher blogs are A-OK, and so are all sorts of other happy Personal Learning Networks (more on that soon).