I’ve spent a lot of time this week in this bed snuggling with this little bundle of snotty yumminess. Everybody’s sick in this house, but today my oldest (aka pooh bear) is back at school and piglet (above) is prancing around the house demanding SNACKS and Yubo is looking hot in a suit and the skinny tie I bought him while he goes on interviews.
I, on the other hand, am still confined to my bed.
I’m sick and have in fact been in bed wearing the same sweats and Yubo’s long-sleeve shirt since Wednesday night when I came home from class and threw myself into bed. I knew I was sick by Tuesday night, but I had promised a friend I would teach her freshman composition class about blogging for a blog project they have and then I had a seminar class in the evening. It just doesn’t do to let down your friends or miss the first day of a class. Still, by Wednesday night I felt like crawling into the fetal position and crying about how much I hurt. I missed work Thursday morning and today I’m missing volunteering in my son’s class and lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in months. I hate missing things, but it hurts to move right now and, besides, there’s no reason to infect my students, a classroom full of six-year-olds, and my poor friend. At least that’s what I’m telling myself to make myself feel better.
Even though I probably should have been in bed, the blogging lesson I gave for my friend’s class was pretty fascinating. Not so much my lesson, but the perspective of the students I was teaching. In a lot of ways, the generation of kids coming of age right now have lives that are much more technology integrated. When I was in high school, everybody had pagers and memorized “pager code” (143 637! right? anyone?), AOL was still king of the internet (“You’ve got mail!”), I could sing along with the noise that the dial-up made when it was trying to connect to the internet, and over the summer I got in trouble for hanging out in AIM chat rooms. Now there’s twitter and facebook and blogs and the internet is wireless and you’re online as soon as you turn on your computer. Internet is on your phone and actual books, newspapers, and magazines are being hailed as things of the past. (To which I solemnly declare – NEVER!)
So when I agreed to teach my friend’s class of nineteen year olds about blogging, I expected my instruction to be at least somewhat redundant. I mean, setting up a blog isn’t that much more complicated than setting up a facebook account, is it? (Fun fact: I had a blog for years before I set up a facebook account. Actually, I had a blog before facebook existed.) And even if I didn’t expect most of the students to actually write a blog, I did assume that they read blogs. Interestingly enough, NONE of them had ever written a blog. One of them read a non-tumbr blog on a regular basis (a blog on a molecular biology, as that’s his major – I thought that was pretty cool!). Two more of them knew what tumblr was and occasionally read tumblr blogs. The other dozen and a half of them – nothing. So has blogging become passe amongst the so-called internet generation?
I look at the blogosphere today and it seems to me to be vibrant, diverse, and constantly evolving. When I started blogging (circa 2001, baby!), my blog was basically a very literal interpretation of the medium – my private diary made public. Public in that my mother and my best friend read it, at least. It was a lot of angst and posts consisting entirely of angsty quotes. (Forgive me, I was young.) After I became pregnant with my son in 2005, my husband and I started a baby blog to share our lives with our far-flung friends and relatives, but in a totally unexpected turn of events, strangers started reading our blog. Strangers who wrote blogs themselves. And then suddenly, there I was, plugged right into the whole mommy (and daddy) blogging thing. Not long after, I and some of the women I had “met” via blogging started Kimchi Mamas, which continues today as a place for mothers of Korean American children to share, discuss, debate, and reflect. My next blog was another personal blog, part mommy blog, part design/fashion blog, and meanwhile I picked up professional blogging gigs writing about fashion and parenting. And after an extended blogging hiatus, now there’s this, my newest blog project, which is much more compartmentalized but which reflects an ongoing passion and interest of mine.
I’m not sure why my friend’s students don’t read blogs. My teaching partner, who is ten years younger than me and so is much closer in age to those (and our) students, reads blogs. I know because he was wearing a hyperbole and a half t-shirt one day and we got to talking. (He was also wearing a Harry Potter t-shirt the day I met him, which automatically endeared him to me forever and ever.) At some point this semester, the professor of our class has committed me to teaching blogging for our class so I guess I’ll have another sample from which to ponder this quandary.
I think blogs are such an amazing medium for self-expression, and I think that using them as part of a composition class makes a lot of sense. I hope that after their writing class is over, they’ll return to blogging to write about something they’re interested in – music or fashion or baking or molecular biology. There are very few barriers to self-expression when it comes to blogging, which is part of the beauty of it, and I’m glad that I could be part of taking one more barrier down. Here’s a blog, here’s how to set one up, here’s how to write a post, add pictures, publish.
In the spirit of teaching young people (oi, when I did I become old enough to teach “young people” things??) about blogging, here are a few of my favorite blogs written by high school and college-aged people:
style rookie – now a sophomore in high school, Tavi Gevinson has been blogging since she was 11. ELEVEN. And yes, like with all prodigious children, it’s easy to laser in on the AMAZING YOUTHFUL AGE NUMBER and the fact that she sits front row at fashion shows and has appeared on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me (okay, is it just me – public radio nerd – that is wildly impressed with this particular factoid?). Also, she has her own online magazine for teens called Rookie Mag, which is all kinds of awesome – the kind of thing that I wish had been around when I was her age. But mostly, she’s got that rare quality of creativity and confidence that most teenagers and even most fully-grown adults (raising my hand) still struggle with. She’s got a unique perspective and it’s beautiful and weird and I can’t say I always get it, but it’s always, always interesting.
new tiger in town – a blog by Sophia Chua-Rubenfield, the daughter of the debated-to-death Tiger Mom. Sophia is whip smart and attending Harvard (no surprises there), but she’s also got a great sense of humor and her voice is a winning mix of maturity, idealism, and irreverence.
La Vagabond Dame – Natalie is seventeen, and her winter formal dress? was amazing. Her blog is a new find of mine, and I love her style. At some point it’s going to become weird (or weirder) to be taking style tips from a seventeen-year-old, but I think (hope?) I can still get away with it for a few more years.
the aftermath of rainbows and unicorns – Sam lost her mother and her older brother on 9/11, and has basically raised herself and her two little sisters since then. She’s a college student now, and she’s amazing. Hard-working, pragmatic, thoughtful, protective. I’m pretty much blown over in admiration for her every time I read her blog.
I Was A Foster Kid – LT was a foster kid. She’s been through hell, and she’s fighting her way out. She’s smart, articulate, and has a huge and tender heart. Her blog is both heartbreaking and inspiring.
Do you read any blogs by teenagers or young adults? Or are you a student with a blog who breaks my unscientific sample of college freshmen?
I am immersed in books. At work, I help students with reading comprehension, I facilitate discussions about literature, and then I help students write about the books they’ve read. At school, I read and research and write about literature. At home, I read to my children and listen to my six-year-old as he reads aloud. When I volunteer in his classroom, I am often asked to help his classmates as they struggle through phonics readers. In the playground, I bring picture books and read to the children who want a break from more active play.
After all, I was the otherwise obedient child who read under my covers at night by the dim light of my nightlight and then swiftly pretended to be asleep when my mama would come to check on me. I was the child who preferred reading to playing, to watching television, to playing video games, to practically everything. I was the child for whom books was the ultimate pleasure, a world where I could see and experience all things and all places and all times.
I also just really, really love books. I love the smell of books – the crisp smell of new paper and the musty smell of old tomes. I love how a book feels in my hand, I love the texture of the paper as I turn a page. I love the experience of curling up with a book in a comfy place. It is probably unsurprising, therefore, that as much as I embrace and often prefer the digital versions of newspapers and even magazines, I don’t like e-readers. They aren’t bad per se, but my attachment to the experience of reading actual books and to books as objects in and of themselves makes reading e-books a comparatively cold experience.
