Teach ‘Em How to Fish

Long time, no blog! – New purpose

As I think about how long it’s been since my last post, I feel depressed. This has been a tough year, or at least a very, very busy year:

1. We adopted another baby, which involved a month-long trip to Chicago, which is where he was born.
2. We’re trying to move from our current house to a place in a neighboring community.
3. This year in my job has been tough, from a personal growth in tech integration perspective, has been difficult… No support for further integration of blogging, podcasting, or other Web 2.0 tools. No Child Left Behind, and our site administration’s interpretation of our “Program Improvement” sanctions, have really taking a lot of energy.

All of these have kind of crowded out professional blogging (this blog) for a spot at the top of the priority list. Sometimes, I think of it like this: I should spend more time communicating with my wife and sons (people I can actually see and live with) rather than people I don’t see and probably have never met. Kinda crummy, since I really enjoy this blog.I’ve been thinking about writing a lot, though. I have grown in lots of ways. Not ways that involve giving you, my blog audience, a new link or website to try in your classroom, but growing nonetheless. Some growth has been personal, some has been professional, some has been spiritual. Through a lot of pondering, I’ve decided that learning and growth is messy, learning and growth doesn’t fit neatly into one box or the other all the time, and that I need to write about topics that don’t necessarily fit into one neat category.Some topics I’ve been pondering, that are worthy of discussion here, might even relate to the spiritual. I am a Christian, and am very enthusiastic about God’s truth, and what He would have me do with my life, my job, and my relationships. Until now, I have hesitated to branch out from this blog’s initial subtitle, “Reflections of how to empower students and other teachers with and about technology.” Perhaps this was arrogant in the first place. Perhaps it put a lot of pressure on me. Perhaps it was simply too narrow. In any case, I’ve decided to include more topics in this blog. I won’t even have to change its name (”Come follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” Matthew 4:19) So for my occasional posts about faith, I’ll just categorize my posts appropriately, so those of you who might not want to read about how faith relates to the job of a teacher, can just skip those. But those of you who’d like to explore how the Christian faith is relevant to daily life can go ahead and join the dialogue with me. In the meantime, I’ll have to figure out a new subtitle. Any suggestions?

Tags: Christianity, purpose