I’m on my way home from Maine today by lady and I and her daughter have been visiting her mother in the Mid-Coast region. I’ve just about finished the reorganization on my blog. I have about 1500 entries in the “general/early”category. Now there are slightly fewer than 400. It’s been good. I’ll admit, as I re-filed, I have gone through many of my old entries. It’s amazing how much junk there is: old memes from diaryland, LiveJournal, and other web hosting services I’ve used. But it’s also interesting to find how unhappy I was, and how sick. A good many entries now filed under “personal “deal with my regular illnesses, and my regular sinus trouble. I found reminders of my 100 days of tai chi. I found poetry, now filed under “poetry”, and under “Magic and Druidry”, that show that I was thinking about poetry as one of my magical tools at least six years ago —maybe more like ten years. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have called myself a magician now I can only say, “well, maybe I am.” It’s been quite an evolution.
[…] a while. It’s been a touchy subject since I wrote about it at length several years ago, and saw some of my teaching audience take a leave of absence. Maybe they’ll return someday. Maybe they’re returning now, now that I’m […]
[…] Tim reminded me in a comment on my last entry that I should really be doing more writing about being a teacher, and I’ve had it in mind to do an entry about this assignment I gave my students in American history after the start of the new semester at the end of January. The assignment was simple enough: Write a story about a President, written in such a way that it would be understandable by a third grader, and appeal to them. […]
Our journey, yours and mine together, ends, or perhaps pauses, here. I began following your blog three years ago in order to gain insight into the education of children, not into the vagaries of Druidism, magic, and the occult. I stayed with you during the last x number of months as your blogpath increasingly wended in that direction but now have had enough. I’m sure you would be able to offer some kind of thoughtful, well-argued justification–“my life is a seamless web of learning, teaching, practice,” etc., etc.–but your current emphases are not what I want to read about. Your blog’s subtitle has become either deceptive or too cute by half. I do admire you very much, thank you for myriad insights of value, and wish you all bests. Perhaps we can resume at some point down the road.
Dear Tim,
I think you’re being entirely fair. I think I’ll come back to issues of teaching and learning, and particularly the question of using design processes to teach children, but I needed to sort some stuff out in a public forum. Check back every few months, and see if I’ve gone back to teaching. In the meantime, if you have a blog of your own, let me know, and I’ll happily link to it.