Post a Secret… Education and the ‘Real’

Strange thoughts strangely fitting for a night spent refreshing a resume. It is a strange process of ever increasing ‘truthiness’ the older you get… No longer do I have ‘worm farmer’ or ‘house painter’ on my resume, I don’t need to stretch the teaching credentials anymore, and that feeling like I need to describe the way I walked around the work site to fill up that extra two lines is gone (”and I always put my tools away”). I now shrink the font, instead of enlarge it. But there is very little ‘real’ in a resume. I try to sneak some in, but I have, once again, decided that that would have to wait for a future interview process.

It’s the blog real that it gets me thinking about. Much of the things that I hear myself and others smarter than I say about blogging is about students ‘getting a voice’ and being empowered. I wonder about students ‘getting a voice’. We live in a culture of repression, where our feelings are governed by propriety, by the necessity to conform to given situations. Something that came into full focus upon reading technorati’s second highest rated blog Post a Secret. Some of the posts are no doubt people playing around, trolls in the blog as it were, but some have that real feeling of truth. That kind of truth that binds us together with people at the oddest of moments, when eye contact is followed by that rare pronoucement of truth. I remember my first one as an adult “we really don’t like each other alot of the time, if it weren’t for the kids we wouldn’t be together at all, are you REALLY sure you want to get married.”

There is a natural restraint in much of the blogger universe, particularly amongst teachers. We are a wary crowd (wary used in lieu of more direct and honest terms that I wont use without three paragraphs of context). What happens, I wonder, when the ‘I want to kill myself’ posts start showing up in the classroom blogs. (I’m sure it’s happened somewhere by now, with all the accompanying questions about what the poster ‘really’ feels) I remember being a teenager, my voice wasn’t very happy. And I, for one, am quite pleased that there isn’t a portfolio of all the silly things that I wrote and felt at that time. While I do see my identity as one created by my history, I also wonder about my history never going away… There’s something about all this ‘publicness’ of the private that scares me. The honesty doesn’t scare me, I strive for that kind of honesty. It’s other people’s reaction to honesty that scares me… and i really don’t know why.

late night, and good night to all of you.

My Secret Postcard for tonight – I always wonder where you all are, and if you are happy when you are in front of your computer screens… I sometimes feel a little addicted.