The Internet is a beautiful thing. Let me rephrase. The Internet is a beautiful thing if you know how to use it properly.
I was recently made aware of a story which is getting national media attention as well as inspiring conversations around water coolers and playgrounds alike. A teacher at a high school in Pennsylvania had/has a blog similar to this one in which we she would vent her daily frustrations (in a seemingly anonymous fashion) about her students and fellow staff members. Apparently, she felt that by blogging under her first name and her last initial that no one would know who it was....unfortunately, that same attention to detail did not carry over throughout the whole page, as she showed the full name of the school at which she teaches and uploaded a picture of herself as well.
There are many who are up in arms that she would write these things and ask how dare she, as an educator, make such disparaging comments about her students. I must admit, my initial gut reaction was the same. However, after mulling it over, I don't see anything wrong with the blog's function in and of itself. It is in her right to write and say whatever she feels, even though there are those who will disagree with what this woman has to say. The fact that she didn't properly protect her anonymity is where the fault lies here. Granted, it is in her rights to say what she thinks without censure however, as a teacher making comments about the children she educates, it is her professional responsibility to make her rantings as broad and lacking in specificity as possible.
And, while I know there are some that will retract with disgust at what I am about to divulge, I must admit that, in a way, her audacity has inspired me. I feel like we all have so much to say and we spend so much energy and time calculating the "right" way to say everything to the point where we do ourselves a disservice since in the end, what we come up with is a mere shadow of our original thought or feeling. So I have started my own blog....in a society where most of us don't have the time OR the energy to censor every thought we have, we end up not speaking about the things that matter most to us and when we do, we merely graze the surface. At the end of the day, we have so many thoughts pent up in our minds that we can't sleep, turning us into a nation, maybe even a WORLD, of over-stressed zombies. So maybe the way to stop that vicious cycle, at least for myself, is to drop off this "thought baggage" somewhere.....
Since I don't plan on publicizing this blog to my friends and family, I don't even know if anyone out there will be reading along with my random ramblings. But if you have stumbled upon this page, thanks for reading and taking this journey with me.
