Blog-worthiness

It took me awhile to post here, and I'll tell you why. I resisted this. I'm old school. I don't look it (well... perhaps I'm just kidding myself...). But there you have it. My perception of blogging has been that it's just a high-tech version of the Jerry Springer Show -- a forum for any self-absorbed schmoe to have their 15 minutes of fame. Before you start throwing rotten tomatoes at your computer monitor, this only LOOKS like a knock to anyone who blogs. It is, in fact, a confessional of sorts about me and my propensities, which I've worked against for many years now. They include a tenacious, albeit subdued, desire for those 15 minutes of fame. Those little devils that sit on my shoulders... (yes, I have two shoulders... and neither supports a little halo'd sprite wearing a nightgown and a set of delicate wings). OK... I digressed and actually decided to leave that last sentence as incomplete and grammatically WRONG. Why? Because I'm a daring grad student who is now seasoned and gutsy enough to question authority and spit against the wind. Ha! I say...

Anyway, upon discovering The Blog... those little devils on my shoulders suddenly woke up after years of virtuous hibernation. They've been rubbing their little red hands together and whispering sweet nothings in my ears about how blogging is GOOD for me. That I am, in fact, Blog-worthy. That I DO in fact have entitlement to those 15 minutes. They are the self-same buffoons who wake me up at midnight to plow through a box of Godivas and watch Netflix reruns of Adam-12. In either case, the next morning I arise full of the regret and self-loathing I haven't experienced since that time, some years ago now, when I woke up behind a dumpster in Coney Island.

But never mind...

I have made a critical connection here -- an "ah hah" moment, if you will -- one which confirms that I do, indeed, have a firm grasp of the obvious. Perhaps... we can discuss blogging as a sort of public form of process pedagogy. A metacognitive approach to process. We write and think, presumably at the same time (unlike conventional composition which somehow expects us to do them separately). If we have a healthy dose of self-consciousness, we then go back through our writing-thinking entry, line-by-bloody-line, to ensure we're saying what we truly, genuinely want to say, and that it is in concert with what the audience should be reading. The latter is so subjective as to yield a plethora of blog entries which are probably not really blog-worthy... Like this one perhaps.

Suffice it to say that when I begin to teach composition, my approach initially would be to open a blog for the students. Writing is thinking; blogging is writing; ergo...

It is indeed a process of creation and self-discovery. You can't get much better than that. Well. OK... You can: The blog allows students to really consider the audience, as well as themselves. Assuming my students will be younger than me (and who isn't?) they might be more agreeable to the concept. For them -- that young, brave generation who has no fear of new devices that begin with a lower-case "i," I will encourage blogging. And they shall be dubbed "Blog-worthy."