Well, I think I’m waking up the blog.
I have more time on my hands than I used to—having stepped down as Head Coach for Varsity Girls Soccer after fifteen years—and I’m looking forward to revisiting and further exploring the overgrown paths my teaching used to travel.
This blog at one time served an important role in my life as the place where I thought and wrote most deeply about parenting and teaching. A lot of my core beliefs took shape in these posts and in conversation with my readers. I hear myself to this day repeating—almost verbatim—ideas that I first composed and refined here. I have missed the practice.
Nevertheless, I’m more than a little nervous to open this door again. For nearly eight years my blog has sat abandoned without explanation, like a house whose occupants have vanished leaving half-eaten breakfast on the dining room table. Maintaining the blog had become a chore, an open loop demanding attention and energy in short supply. Moreover, while I appreciated the public nature of blogging—being accountable to an audience really pushed my thinking, and who doesn’t enjoy having a voice?—at some point I burnt out on the need to maintain the particular tone of earnest engagement and polite criticism and guarded optimism that all my posts seemed to hit. And it took a lot of time. I’m not a fast writer in the best of circumstances.
Still, I think I’m ready to give it a go again. At least for a while.
Why? Well, I’m teaching an 8th grade elective course this spring that I want to document. It’s an undertaking that I’m both excited and nervous about, the realization of a vision I first articulated in this post from twelve years ago. I’m not necessarily convinced that this format is my best option for documenting and sharing this adventure; blogging seems so 2010ish. I could probably share much more widely and successfully on other social media platforms.
Maybe I will do that, too (at least on Twitter—this old dog doesn’t really understand Instagram, much less TikTok).
But for now, Postcards is back. Maybe for a limited time, likely with a limited focus, almost certainly for a limited audience.
Or at least it will be as soon as I hit “Publish” . . .
Glad to see you giving this another go! Seeing a blog post from you was like hearing from an old friend!