Since my last post, I have:
- Completed student teaching
- Earned my bachelor's degree
- Traveled for six weeks in Egypt
- Moved from Ohio to Texas
- Lived with extended family
- Moved into my first apartment
- Joined a Baptist church (I didn't see that one coming!)
- Survived three entire years of teaching 7th grade
- Returned to Guatemala for another week of serving Colegio Juan Wesley
- Paid in full one of my student loans
- Successfully settled in a new city, with a thankful heart
...all while walking with a God who is SO incredibly faithful.
So, this blog is from another lifetime, really.
But I'm returning simply because of my students. This past school year, I decided to try blogging with my smallest class. After the standardized tests nearly sucked away all our energy, we devoted several class days to beginning our own blogs. My students are thrilled any time we get to use computers, but it was the month of May, and as much as I hate to admit it, I wasn't expecting much from them. Something happened, however, that was enough to sell me on blogging for the rest of my teaching career: In a computer lab full of twenty-some seventh graders, during the month of May, after the tests were over, with summer so tantalizingly close, all I could hear was the clack clack clack of keys--busy fingers, writing.
You have to understand--this was the class who whined when asked to write a paragraph. They are bright, talented kids, but, for most of them, writing was just not their thing. So even though their posts weren't necessarily mind-blowing, and even though we never really established the sense of blogging community I was hoping for, the silence in the computer lab those few days spoke volumes to me about the power of giving students the platform of a blog.
This coming school year, I want to start this from the beginning. I want to teach my students how to add their voices to the global conversation. So many of them do not know they have powerful voices.
My return to this dusty old blog is my attempt to regain my own voice.
