Okay so it turns out this was harder than I thought it would be. I wanted to start “blogging” and I figured it would be easy enough. I could think of countless times I had some interesting narrative in my mind regarding math or teaching or math teaching. I had always wanted to start putting those narratives somewhere. The blog made sense. Plus all the cool kids were doing it. So it was settled. I sat down with a group of teachers who I liked a lot, Carl offered to set up Coast2Coast and it was on. And then I had to start…
Yeah. Well… In 2014 I had like 5 posts. I mean maybe 7, I don’t know, but it wasn’t impressive. I’m not thrilled with it. As the New Year begins, I’m re-motivated to write, but I’ve spent some time recently trying to figure out what made it so tough last year. Here’s what I can come up with:
1) I’m lazy. Well I’m a lot less lazy than I used to be, which I feel great about, but I can still burn an hour doing not much at all and wonder where it went. I assume/hope most people have that talent.
2) It takes time. Like right now, I’m looking up at the clock in the corner of my screen thinking about how I need to make some dinner soon and how I might not have time to finish this blog about not having time to finish blogs.
3) No one is reading my posts. Well Carl has probably read a few, or maybe all of them. Carl is pretty good at that. Thanks Carl!
4) I don’t know what to write about. See I think this is the big one. The narratives I think of are often publishable, but many of them aren’t. Maybe they are too specific, too student oriented, too math oriented, or too difficult to describe without pages and pages of back-story. I find myself thinking, “Well I could blog about this but no one knows about that.” Which is silly because no one is reading anyway, but still. Which brings me to…
5) I don’t know who/what I’m writing for. I don’t know my audience. Well I do, it’s Carl. But I mean I don’t know who I even want as my audience. Am I writing this for me? Is that what these posts are about until people start reading? Are they for personal growth only until I become a “cool kid” someday and actually have more than 5 twitter followers? Or should I write them as if I am cool and people actually are reading and might comment and might care? See, I don’t know.
I do know this: I’m getting hungry.
I also know that I like doing this. Writing. Writing about what I’m thinking. I even like writing about thinking about what I’m writing about. (That actually makes sense right? Write?) So I’m going to keep at it. Hopefully a lot more often this year. And hopefully as the posts keep coming I’ll start to figure it out and actually start making this blogging thing useful… Wish me luck!