Hello!

Know that chill that goes through your body as you dip your toe in a chilly pool? I’m so there at this point, as I dip my toe in the world of Web 2.0 and blog about it. Right now the pool is chilly because I don’t know a lot about it; I’m hopeful that, as I learn more, I’ll get used to the water.

Today my thought is less on web 2.o than on teaching in general. I read Sarah Fine’s article yesterday in the Washington Post about why she was leaving teaching. Sarah left the Washington DC school system after five years of teaching. One comment she made was, “When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it’s unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long.”

So why have I stayed for over 14 years? Simply put, I teach because I enjoy being with kids, learning new things, and doing something worthwhile. I think I do have some talent or gift for teaching, and I work consciously to get better at it. I’m not a hero; I don’t teach lots of students in an inner-city school beset with budget problems and intractable bureaucracy. But I did choose teaching over the ‘more prestigeous’ field of government worker, even though it took me 12 years in education to make as much as I made when I left government.

Part of my commitment to ‘lifelong learning’ is learning about web 2.0 tools. I’ve had help, and maybe I’ll write about that help tomorrow. Learning new things is not easy for me, but I’m doing this because I’ve become convinced by people a lot smarter than I am that web 2.o represents the future of education.