Blogging

It has been two long - very long - years since I have attempted blogging. As a teacher of English Language Arts, I am constantly writing - to model the process, to create exemplars, to show my students what it is like to put your voice on paper bravely. But, I have avoided blogging.

I'm not sure what it is about blogging. I write poetry regularly, I write in my journal, I write short stories and model descriptive paragraph writing, I write all variety of assignments and lesson plans and meeting notes and shopping lists and .... maybe I'm all out of words at the end of the day? 

Every year in September I start the year with blogging - with my students, I mean. Every Grade 7 and 8 student I teach gets a blog. They spend a week playing with their templates and creating welcome posts, and another few months writing public responses to things we've read in class and commenting on their peers' posts. 

And just like with my own blog, my student blogs fade. By January, we aren't blogging anymore. We're on to film studies and writing essays, and blogs are left on the shelf to gather dust. By June, the blogs are barely remembered. 

Except that, during my exit interviews with students, many of them bring up blogging as an exciting topic - a new skill they acquired this year, a form of writing they truly enjoyed. So, why is it so hard to keep up? Why do our blogs get lost and left behind every year?