Sitting around in the Psych classroom after school one day, three of us teachers began kicking around the idea of creating blogs in which to reflect on our teaching and our learning. This blog is the product of that conversation.
The title of the blog comes from a post by Frank Chimero, a designer of some note, who wrote (since taken offline):
Urban sprawl is bad. Intellectual sprawl is good. Giving up the previous leads to the latter. Putting people close together forces them to rub off on one another.
This blog, then, is an attempt to take my ideas, my reflections, my teaching strategies, and put them into close contact with others. At the very least, I’m making my thoughts and feelings public; whether anyone else reads, comments, or cares, frankly, is irrelevant in a certain sense. In another, though, the point of making this a blog is that I hope others read and respond.
Consider this the digital version of a couch in the Faculty Lounge — where we teachers alternately celebrate our successes and fall on our swords; we cheer each other, and we lovingly jeer; we puh, we prod, we pull each other. And through it all, the one thing that we hope for, more than anything else, is that our students become good and happy adults, who make the world just a little better than we could do on our own.