love me or hate me

I got course evaluations from last semester, and there is no middle ground. They love me or hate. I got more good reviews than bad, but the bad ones were really bad. And the good ones were really good. It's weird. Several of them wrote that this was their favorite class, that they absolutely loved it, lots of exclamation points and capital letters. But one student wrote that my comments on her paper made her feel stupid and destroyed any confidence she had in writing. She (I'm guessing about who it was) suggested that I write, "This is good but you need to make improvements here," instead of just pointing out all the bad parts. Another student said he learned nothing at all and that it was three hours of tuition thrown out the window. Harsh. Some of them mentioned that they didn't realize the class would have so much online work when they registered. I have remedied that problem for summer and fall, and the online component is listed in the course schedule. (But there will be some who still don't get it.)

It's not easy trying to figure out what to do with class evaluations every semester. This one is particularly difficult because the responses are so polar. Was it really that good AND that bad? I think that I can soften up my comments on papers. Students always think I grade too hard, but my colleagues get that comment a lot, too. And many teachers inflate grades, which affects students' expectations. I am confident in my grading, but I'm going to look back on the comments I wrote on student papers and consider the tone. Maybe I'll see something in hindsight.

A few questions for the blogosphere:
Is it important to find good things to say about every student paper, even if it is seriously flawed?
How do I deal with evaluations that are so polarized?
Should I pay to check myself out on Pick-a-Prof or will that do more harm than good?

found a place to live

We're buying a house. It's a really nice, brand new house. Actually, right now it's a slab, but in a couple of months it will be a house. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes it makes me so nervous I want to throw up.

On another note, summer school started today and half of my students have already logged in to the course website and started their assignments. Great sign. I like starting a new class--I'm always happy and optimistic. I love that about this career--every few months there's a clean slate and a fresh start.

finished semester but no break in sight

Blame the light blogging on too much work, too little sleep, and not enough hands. I finished grading in record time because the papers were very short. I may drop this assignment for the summer because it's the summer and it will give me time to think about whether I want to continue it in the fall. Perhaps the deliberations on the value of this assignment deserve a separate post, but not today. I'm considering dropping it only because it is autobiographical, and those are so hard to grade. How do you give someone a bad grade on a paper about their parents' divorce or their best friend's suicide, no matter how badly written it is? So the question is not if this assignment is valuable--I think it is--but if I can use it responsibly. Good news is that despite some unusually high grades on the last paper, the final grades turned out exactly as I thought they should. It's nice when you get to the end of the semester, look at how it all turned out in the end, and agree with the outcome. It's not fun when you get to the end and wonder, how did this person not get an A? Or how did this guy manage to pass?

So now I have to finish revising my essay that is being published. I have signed a contract for it, but I still have a fear that in the end it will be thrown out. I won't believe it until I see it in print. I think my insecurity about it is based on my current, less-than-ideal working situation--sleep-deprived, hormonal, and stealing bits of time here and there to work on it. But I did a whole year of coursework in that state, and it worked out alright. By the time I finish the article, it will be time to start summer school, and somewhere in the midst of that, I'll be moving somewhere. Still don't know where or when. I'm just teaching one class in the summer, so I won't be too overworked. And so far it looks like a very small class, so maybe I won't have massive amounts of grading to do. I do have some preparation to do for this because even though I'm teaching the same class with the same book, it's in the summer and totally online, so there's some adapting to do.

Enough rambling. This post has bored even me.

grading not going so well

I'm moving through the papers just fine, but I am not pleased with what I am seeing. Students are missing the point of the assignment. And maybe being tired from caring for the baby has made me less patient or tolerant of errors that I see as results of carelessness, lack of effort, or unwillingness to ask questions. Despite childbirth, I have been constantly available to my students online and I have posted messages to remind them of that.

The biggest problem is that many of them have totally missed the point of the assignment and have submitted papers that are entirely descriptive and not analytical at all. No thesis to be found. This is their THIRD paper, so analysis and argument are not new concepts in the class. And we went over and over and over this assignment in our on-campus meetings and online. I was worried initially that I had not made the assignment clear, but some students have done exactly what was asked of them. Not just the brightest ones, either. When a lot of students get it wrong, I feel insecure about the way I have taught them--that is it my fault, not theirs. But I feel at this point like it is simply a result of not following directions. So as I've been marking their papers, I have cut and pasted excerpts from the paper prompt to show them, "Here's what you were supposed to do, and you didn't do it." That's the best I can do with it.

So what to do next semester to make it better? I am teaching the same class in the summer and again in the fall, and instead of revamping the class, I am going to try to improve on this model (I'm sort of attached to it, and I want it to be great, and I also have a lot of things to do besides searching for new textbooks and developing new a syllabus). In the fall, I am doing the hybrid on-campus/online class, but in the summer I am totally online. And that was not so fun when I taught Tech Writing, largely because of the whole following directions thing.

So here's an idea that I'm toying with: quizzes over paper prompts.
This idea feels a little juvenile to me and even potentially insulting to the students. When I was an undergraduate, I would have been pissed if the instructor had quizzed me on my ability to read instructions. But it would make (most of) them read the prompts that I have spent so much time developing. And maybe they would write the papers that I have assigned.

Another option that I will most likely use is required online discussions of the papers in progress. We had those this semester and they really paid off for some students. That method puts a lot more responsibility on the students to identify their problems and bring up the right questions and topics for discussion. It's not as efficient as a quiz. It only works for the ones who are willing to put the effort into participating--REALLY participating and not just going through the motions to get credit. Part of me says that those are the students I should prioritize, anyway. But another part of me really wants to figure out how to motivate the ones who don't care so much and don't want to put in so much effort. It's easy to nurture the great students. I also want to reach the students who don't want to be reached. The perpetual frustration of a teacher.

back to work

The real work starts up again today. I've done some quick checking in with school work and my students over the past two weeks, but today the real work starts--I have a shiny new batch of papers to grade. Fortunately, my class is very small this semester--only fourteen students (not counting the disappearing student who is still on the roll but has not materialized in months--there's one in every class). I meet my students one last time on Monday. They are supposed to do evaluations. I wonder how many will actually show.

I'm recovering well (though I still use the progressive verb--there is recovering yet to do). Today I'm wearing some non-maternity jeans, which makes me feel better. Of course, I only have one pair of non-maternity jeans that fit right now, but I don't mind wearing them every day. It is no fun wearing maternity clothes when you're not pregnant. And breastfeeding is now going well--no more blisters, no more scabs. Which is good because as of this weekend, there is no more Vicadin!

Many things are on the horizon. Life changing things (as if my life were not changing enough already). There will likely be lots of blogging-things-out.

question while grading

What do you tell a student who frequently uses the wrong words? Lots of people use wrong words, especially when they are trying to sound smart or vary their vocabulary. I've done it. But some people do it all the time (like my brother! if you're reading this, sorry, man, but you do it a lot). How do you help them? I'm pointing out the individual words that he has used incorrectly, but what do I say about the general habit of using words when he doesn't know what they mean. Because he probably thinks he does know what they mean.

I don't worry about him too much. He could be our president one day.

Teaching Web 2.0, part 2

(I know it's long, but I hope you'll still read it, especially if you're a writing teacher.)

As I mentioned in this post, I have chosen to analyze user-generated web content in my Advanced Composition class because most students are already personally invested in it and because it raises interesting issues about composition.

I have to keep the discussion of the latter part on the light side because I don't think they're entirely ready to deal with those issues in depth. Part of that is because, despite what the title of the class seems to indicate, this is a sophomore-level course. They are still dealing with a lot of writing issues that are covered in freshman composition, which many students never actually took because there are so many ways to get out of it. What I want them to do, mainly, is to expand their concept of writing to include composition on the web, with its fluidity and temporality and globality and hypertextuality and collaborativality (okay, so that's not a word--I got carried away). I want them to think about what they write online as writing.

The major obstacle to that is a continued attachment to paper. Now, I'm not saying that I don't like paper. Paper is fine. But there are all these new ways to write that don't quite feel as legitimate as paper. The traditional academic paper with its page counts and red pen grade marking. Anything else seems less serious, less academic. They (we, everybody) need to be able to take electronic texts seriously, as they read them and as they compose them. To that end, I'm conducting an almost paper-free class (with the exception of the textbook) to distance them from paper and force them to participate in electronic composition and communication for a grade (and doesn't that somehow make it real and legitimate--when it's for a grade?).

But I'm not doing anything especially revolutionary here. I think that I could have gone much farther, but I'm holding back. I'm still requiring the traditional academic papers that are in the familiar paper format. They are composed, submitted, peer reviewed, and graded entirely electronically--never printed out. But still, the electronic versions of the papers are just an imitation of the printed papers. They have the same visual format, the same page breaks, the same everything, just appearing as an image on the computer screen instead of in their hands. Even that much distance from paper is unsettling for some. In his course evaluation last semester, one student from Technical Writing, a totally web-based class, lamented the loss of the red pen on his graded papers. He felt like the electronic grademarking, which mimics the red pen, was not as effective.

I am keeping the traditional paper format this semester for several reasons. One is that I have an obligation to them to prepare them for academic writing that will be required of them in other classes. Even though they were supposed to learn the conventions of academic writing in freshman comp, I still feel like I would be misleading them if I attempted to change the way they conceive of academic writing when in reality the college papers that are assigned in every class are not much changed. Another reason is that they are comfortable with the traditional format, and they feel more like they understand what is expected of them. If I tried to turn their whole notion of writing upside-down, I think that they would be so distracted, and some of them upset, trying to figure out "what I'm looking for" in their writing projects that I would have to sacrifice a lot of the work that I want to do with them. I'm not sure that they would be better writers at the end of the class, and to make them better writers is my primary goal.

Also, I must admit, the traditional paper format is more comfortable to me because I know how to grade it. I know how to grade it because I have written many and they have been graded and I have modeled my grading on my experiences as a student. (This is the first time I've really connected grading with being a student, but isn't that how we learn how to grade? Certainly no one has ever taught me how to grade a paper.) When I assign innovative projects, I am frequently pleased with the results but also left with the problem of trying to assign grades for which I have no previous reference. I just don't know what to do with them.

So what I'm doing this semester is easing them into electronic, web-based composition for low-stakes assignments but still taking the biggest parts of their grades from traditional papers. I am asking them to analyze electronic communication and write papers about it, which I guess is another way of easing them into the thing. We are using "Web 2.0," or user-generated content, or whatever you want to call it, every day, but our foundation is still paper, even if that paper appears as an image on the screen. I think that I've made the right decisions for the class (actually, I may have gotten in trouble with the department had I done anything too different), but I still feel like I'm doing it half-way, holding back. And the result of that is that I feel like I am trying to sell my students on something and they're not really buying it.

Teaching Web 2.0, part 1

The theme of my Advanced Composition class is not technology or user-generated web, but it is a huge component. The theme is actually "Identity and Community," and under that umbrella, we're looking at the ways in which identity and community are constructed and expressed via electronic communication (I know I've described this before, but I thought a recap was in order). We're using blogs and message boards and the class is almost paperless, so the technology is in use all the time, but we're starting a four-week unit next week in which we'll study specifically web communication and virtual communities. And I'm showing this video.

The concept that underlies Web 2.0 is not exactly new. The internet has been connecting people and allowing people to create their own content for a very long time. What the video points out, though, is that those services that are being called Web 2.0 now have removed the need to understand coding and programming and "how" technology works by making user-friendly, accessible programs that allow people to put whatever they want online without any advanced technological knowledge. Those kinds of programs have also been around for a while, but now they are pervasive. Everybody's doing it. And while the questions of authorship and copyright and even relationships that the video's ending alludes to are also not really new--they were around long before Flickr and MySpace and Blogger--the exponential growth of Web 2.0 has brought those questions to the radar of many more people who don't necessarily identify themselves as artists, authors, or academics.

So what about teaching? I selected this topic for two reasons. It is timely and interesting to students, which hopefully will help them to enjoy the class and encourage them to put more effort into their writing assignments. And it presents intriguing questions about composition. With my theme, we are focused more on the first part. I'm asking students to be self-conscious about their use of user-generated web and to really consider its function and potential in their lives. Based on their blogs, I think that a lot of them do not realize how prominent the internet is in their personal lives, and I suspect that is because it is so commonplace that they find it unremarkable. I asked them to blog about their use of the internet, and several of them immediately stated that they could not live without it. They are plugged in all the time and feel anxious when they are away from it. But many others were reluctant to make such a statement, adamant that they are not "addicted" (a word used frequently among them) to the internet. Their entries almost ran on a pattern--They would insist from the beginning that they don't use the computer that much, mostly just for school. Then they would start to list the things they did online regularly, and the lists became lengthy, even as they continued to insist that they were not that "attached" to it. It went something like this: I don't use the internet much and I just don't understand why people are so attached to it and spend hours on the computer. But I use it all the time to do school work. And to talk to friends and family. And post pictures. And I have to check Facebook every day. But I don't really use it that much.

Issues of composition and authorship are not on their minds (except maybe for the guy who writes music and posts his songs online). Whether they are conscious of it or not, they are invested in the internet as a social tool (and secondarily, I think, as a learning tool). I've been easing them into thinking about it critically, and next week we're hitting it hard as they start writing papers that analyze virtual communities (primary research--yea!). Which brings me to the second big issue--composition. But not today. I don't like long blog posts, and I just wrote one, so now it's time to stop.

The next installment will come soon. And I will respond to the "Academia 2.o" video, which is really about something different.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

This video is much less documentary-ish. I'm going to show it to my class next week.

Academia 2.0

This is a video response to the film "Web 2.0...The Machine is Us/ing Us." I will have comments about this later, but for now I will just share it with you because I think this is something that all of who teach have to care about.

URL for video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tvYc9_wZ38

in case you haven't seen it yet

You should check out the round of discussion on the challenges of young female faculty, starting with Azpazia. Dr. Crazy has assembled a collection of links, so I'll just piggy back on her.

first day of school

Finally! I met my class today, and I was really excited about starting the semester--like, crazy hyper excited, but I tried to keep cool and not be such a dork in front of my students. Of course, today was just a lot of introductory material, throwing it at them pretty fast so they can decide if they want to bail before the add/drop deadline. I couldn't get a vibe from them, though. They all looked a little stunned. Glazed over. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if it was me or my syllabus or all the computers or what. Or maybe it was just 9:00 a.m. At any rate, not my typical first day, and I'm anxious to get back on Monday to see if anything has changed. Or if I've lost half my class.

When I was checking roll, one student told me her name was Mary. After class, she came up to me and told me that she prefers to go by Mary Kay. "I didn't tell you that when you asked," she said, "because I didn't expect that you would want to learn my name."

I'm glad she decided that I was interested in learning her name.

Course evaluations

I've gotten some work done and I think I'll survive my meeting tomorrow. We'll see.

For now, I'm concerned about course evaluations. I do take them seriously and value student feedback, but I also try to keep it in perspective and not get myself worked up and paranoid over one disgruntled student. And isn't there always one? Last semester my class was totally online--never met my students in person although I did make myself available for face-to-face conferences. I am concerned about a few responses.

1. Assignments were too detailed and because of that were confusing. (this was an isolated comment but it stood out to me)
I was surprised at this--I would have expected the opposite to be true. In most of my classes I give assignment prompts that are at least a page long with bulleted lists of the essential elements. I do like my students to have some freedom to be creative, but I have generally found that too much freedom causes them to feel anxious (but that's not always bad). This was a Technical Writing class so the assignments did have precise requirements and were spelled out in great detail, more than I would usually give for a comp or lit class. So what do you think? Is there such a thing as too much detail for a tech writing assignment? How about for a more traditional academic essay? By graduate level, of course, most prompts consist of "Write a term paper. Period." Do lower level undergrads need more instructions while upper level need less? Should an online class have more detailed prompts to make up for the lack of classroom discussion of the assignment?

2. Too many assignments for an online class. (Not so isolated--maybe four people said this)
I think this just represents a problem with student attitudes toward online classes. They see it as a way to save time because they are too busy to sit in a classroom. And then when it requires as much work as a regular class, they are unhappily surprised. So this could just be chalked up to whining and ignored. But I think it might be something that has to be addressed in some way very early in the semester so students snap out of the mindset that they can breeze through the class simply because it is online.

3. Instructor seemed "annoyed or unwilling to offer advice."
Ouch. I am always frustrated when I score below perfect on the accessibility questions. I constantly remind and invite students to ask questions, email me, meet with me, etc. I don't know what to do when a student won't take advantage of it and then scores me low on evaluations. But there is another problem here. I seemed annoyed. Honestly, sometimes I was annoyed. My annoyance came when students did not ask questions or contact me when asked to but also when they did not read instructions and asked me questions that were clearly answered in the assignment prompts, or even worse, in bold letters on the announcements. My response to that was often "Read the instructions carefully and then ask me again if you have any more questions." That probably sounded like I was annoyed. I was. But what is the appropriate response? Electronic communication is, of course, notorious for miscommunications based on tone. No facial expression or tone of voice to help out. But there is also the problem that students (well, people in general) do not want to read instructions for themselves (especially, the long detailed ones in this class). This student's comment bothers me because it is really important to me to be available to my students and for them to feel comfortable approaching me. How do I communicate to them the importance of THEIR responsibility to read the course material carefully without sounding like I am annoyed if they ask me questions?

Incidentally, I did get positive comments on the same question. My favorite: “There was not a reasonable time when I could not reach her, unless it was late at night when normal people sleep.”

So there are a lot of questions, some rhetorical but others to which I would like some real answers. Any thoughts on these issues or course evaluations in general?

milestone blogging: teaching, diss, anonymity

I just realized my last post was number 200. Milestone. I'm trying to make some decisions about the blog.

This is an uncharacteristically long post, so in good technical writing style, I'll give you some headings so you can skip the stuff you don't want to read.

Blog slump:
I am in a blog slump and have been posting a lot more often to my family blog, which is all about pregnancy updates and pictures of RB. I have thought about ditching this blog because lately it's boring. But I'm going to chalk it up to the break and expect it to get better next week. I get all jumpy and anxious during breaks. I enjoy a little time off, but once I rest a bit, I want my routine back. Summer drives me crazy. I am so ready for classes to start because I really really love teaching and I also love to blog about teaching.

Teaching:
One decision I'm trying to make now is how specific to get about my class. I am requiring my students to blog this semester, which means that some will assume that I blog, and one of them will likely find my blog. So do I keep things vague so they can't find me? Or do I just write as though they are all reading it anyway? I prefer to blog more specifically about teaching because I feel like those posts are more substantial, interesting, and useful. But I will have to seriously consider the ramifications of students reading my blog (which I have blogged about before).

Diss:
Another decision I am considering is how specific to get about my dissertation. I have blogged about dissertation process but not much on content. I wonder how useful it might be to me to blog content a bit. It might really help. There is the possibility of a separate dissertation blog, but that doesn't really appeal to me. I also understand that my readers are less interested in my specific project than in broader issues that are more relevant to them. Of course there is also the danger of putting too much of my work out there for others to pillage. Whatever direction it takes, I will do more diss blogging this semester than last semester. Because I will do more diss. I must. I have to stop taking on other projects and get focused. But there is this article that I want to revise and submit for publication. I need to work on that, right?

Anonymity:
I guess this isn't really a decision to be made, but I am just not that interested in anonymity (or as I frequently and more accurately call it, semi-anonymity) anymore. I keep posting RB's real name without thinking. Of course, I've grown so fond of her abbreviation that I've started using it in emails and other shorthand away from the blog. My last name is hidden somewhere on the blog, too, so some people may have run across it. If you Google my very common real name, you won't find me. But if you run across this blog and you know me at all, you'll figure me out quickly. I have written about some very personal experiences, but I'm not a secretive or extremely private person--I have talked about all the stuff I've blogged in the hallways at school--including pregnancy and miscarriage, which I think are the most personal topics I've addressed here. I also don't rant about my friends and coworkers here because several people I know IRL read this blog and I don't think it's appropriate. What it comes down to is that I'm bored with trying to veil my identity in any way. I'm not sure that it's so important to be anonymous. Maybe I've just gotten so comfortable with blogging that it feels normal, not like some secret vice. Plus I also think it's really valuable personally and academically and I want to talk about that with people. And I can't do that if I'm trying to pretend like I don't blog.

Person of the Year; Thank you very much :)

Time magazine's decision to name me--and you, who are participating with me in the user-generated web universe--Person of the Year was like a big ol' Christmas present just for me. This is SOOOO what I'm teaching next semester. It raises so many questions of composition, authorship, audience, identity, and community--very exciting for advanced comp. I am on a teaching high already and I'm just writing the syllabus. After a disappointing semester with technical writing (well, not so much disappointing as just plain boring), I am looking forward to a new course with an exciting topic and a new batch of students. And perhaps I will write a dissertation, too.

grading participation

My head is already in next semester, and I wanted to throw a question out to the blog world: How do you grade participation?

I am torn about whether to include participation as part of a course grade. Including it in the grade communicates to the students that their preparation for and participation in class activities (which will include class meetings and an online component in my case) is essential, but it also ends up being difficult to quantify. How do you make a participation grade more than simply an attendence grade? And how do you keep it from inflating grades?

400 words=awesome writing assignment

I have found a new writing assignment for advanced composition next semester, thanks to a Newsweek story about a literary magazine called 400 Words. The magazine publishes autobiographical nonfiction pieces with a 400-word limit. The theme of my course is Identity and Community, and what better way to wrap up the semester than with this exercise in clear, concise writing? And they will have the option then to submit it for publication. And ending the semester with such a short assignment means less grading stress--especially important since I will have a newborn by then. That's right--teaching next semester and giving birth in April. Can I do it? I sort of have to. I have it all planned out--hopefully Little Bit will respect the schedule.

my online students are being very quiet

Update on ethical dilemmas: I have decided that I will continue to blog about my class but I will avoid references to specific students. That talk will have to stay in the office. (Which is somehow not so bad?) I am still struggling with the Turnitin issue.

For the first time, my students are working on a project with an extended working period--about a month--and it's wrapping up this week. This whole time they have been very quiet. they have small weekly assignments, and they are logging on and doing those, but only two have actually asked questions about the assignment they are working on now. I post announcements frequently, urging them to keep in touch with me, but it has been to no avail. I am sure that some students have felt disconnected from me because of the online format, but this is the first time that I have really felt disconnected from them. I have no idea what is going on.

I can't help but feel like this means they are doing pretty much nothing and will try to throw together their reports in the next two days. We'll see.

ethics of blogging about students, second installment

Okay, I scrolled over my posts for the semester and deleted two which referred to my recent plagiarism case. I have always been careful about the way I blog about students, but this is the incident that made me think very hard about this issue. I do not believe that the posts I deleted say anything that could be harmful to me or the student--in fact they revealed very little info about the case and were two of the shortest posts I have ever written. Just a couple of sentences each. But plagiarism is such a serious and touchy issue that I don't think there is a good way to blog about a case even in the vaguest terms.

So here's another post I want to question. In it I refer to general problems with my class, but I also mention a specific student (not by name, of course) who had not purchased a textbook. Is it okay to refer to one particular student in a blog?

I do believe that the way I discussed my class has been ethical, and I don't think it is anything that could get me into trouble (except that the fact that I have a blog at all is enough in some people's opinion to label me a trouble-maker or a slacker who spends too much time frivolously playing online instead of doing real work--but that's another issue and there's been plenty talk about that already). The problems of an online class are important to discuss and this electronic forum is the perfect medium for it. I believe that blogging about general class issues is useful and ethical, but I still have questions about any reference to a particular student, even when it is vague and anonymous.

Edited to add: I am not so concerned with the question of "Could I get fired for this?" although that is one way to look at it. I am really concerned about whether it is ethical behavior and if it might be some violation of students' trust.

in which the semi-anonymous academic blogger ponders a question of ethics

I’ve asked my technical writing students to discuss ethics issues this semester, including issues of blogging in the workplace, and I thought that I might take a stab at a question that has been on my mind.

Is it ethical to discuss students on blogs?

I have written posts about my students and have read many posts about others’ students, with varying degrees of specificity. But is this okay? There are so many variables to this question—I will try to squeeze them into one blog post and hopefully people will read it even though it’s long. Let me start with what I am calling semi-anonymity and how that factors in.

I am not truly anonymous. Sarah is my real name (but don’t you know twenty other people named Sarah?). I do not post my location or institution, and if you Google me, you will not find this blog. If you came across this blog accidentally, however, I have posted enough information that someone who knows me well, or even someone who is currently taking my class, might figure out that this sounds awfully familiar. This seems like a stretch, but it has happened to me—I found a professor’s blog accidentally. I didn’t know it was him until I saw his photograph—I don’t post my picture on this blog. But I have given my URL to friends and to two former students, and it has gotten around through the grapevine that I’m a blogger, and a few professors have asked me about it (with mixed reactions—one person said, “My opinion of you has totally changed.”—vague comment, but I doubt it was good). I don’t really hide it. I imagine that many bloggers have similar circumstances.

The point is, while I am not readily Google-able, any discussion of my students could potentially be linked directly back to me, depending on who is reading it.

But I talk about my students in person with my coworkers all the time. This blog has been valuable to me as a way to discuss teaching issues with other teachers, and I find conversation among teachers in the halls or in our offices important ways to learn and improve. One might argue that it is not ethical to discuss students at all, but I think that we gain so much through these conversations that makes us better teachers. So is posting about students on a blog different from talking about them in person (assuming, of course, that names are never used)?

Okay, long enough for now. Any thoughts?