I’m at Twitter Math Camp 2014. Normally my inclination at a conference is to take a moment to recap the day from start to finish, as an archive to what I learned. Little things, big things, trying to capture every little morsel. Instead, I think I’ll just write about one thing I’ve been thinking about today, based on sessions and conversations.

180 blogs: Mine from this year

This was prompted due from a 30 minute mini-sesh that Justin Aion had around his 180 blogging adventure this year. For those not in the know, a 180 blog is something teachers started doing a couple years ago — posting once a day.  (It is called a 180 blog because there are supposed to be — though I definitely don’t have — at least 180 school days in an academic year.)

The difference between regular blogs and 180 blogs are that 180 blogs tend to be a single snippet, every day. Sometimes it is just a photograph. Sometimes it’s just a paragraph. Sometimes it’s a brief reflection. And you know what? You know what?

I kept a 180 blog last year too. And I just realized I never mentioned it on this blog, nor did I ever give it a post-mortem or reflection. So tonight, the first evening of TMC14 inspired by a mini-session, that is what I am going to do.

My 180 blog all started because I have an incredible colleague and friend at my school who I know would get along with this community of math teachers online like gangbusters. I wanted to bring him into this world, but it stressed him out too much, and moreso, he didn’t have that much time. I took a stab at ensnaring him by showing him the idea of the 180 blog. It has a low barrier of entry. It involves only 5 minutes a day. And it has a basic structure to it that he could routinize: make a post each day. He agreed! We would both keep a joint 180 blog!

And thus: the very cleverly named ShahKinnell180 blog was born. (Click on the image to be taken there!) [1]

Back to Justin’s TMC talk. He spoke about how he wanted his 180 blog to be centered around reflectiveness. And I think that many people do use them for that. However I was 100% sure that reflectiveness wasn’t something I was looking for.

Besides getting my colleague/friend involved in this online math teacher world, I think my reasons for wanting to do this are as follows:

• I wanted a little archive of my teaching life. So the only rule I had in making it was that I would post a picture every day, and a few words. Nothing expansive, nothing overwhelming. I had in mind those people who take a photograph of themselves everyday for a year, and then splice them all together, resulting in this whole pastiche of the passage of time? I revel in the fact that I now have this little slice of my teaching life all beautifully laid out. Visual. Chronological. And what I kinda love the most: just like the blog is filled with snapshots of things that happened to me-as-teacher (usually from my classes, though not always), the blog itself is now a snapshot of who I am as a teacher.Although I haven’t done this yet (why not??? well I didn’t even think about writing about it here until after it was done for a whole year! so who knows where my head is at), I would love to send it to my parents. Heck, it’s a great way for non-teachers (wow, this could be awesome for teachers-to-be too!) to see a depiction of what people in our profession do, what we get our kids to do, what we think about, what experiences we have. It’s like a regular blog, but less reading — perfect for skimming and being non-threatening!
• I wanted something to keep me on the lookout for the good. My brain constantly tells me I am not good at what I do. And I am someone who can obsess over what’s not going right and just skip over the juicy deliciousness in front of me. (I was that kid in high school who would take a test, get stuck on one or two questions, and leave saying I knew I did horribly on it… not because I was being modest, but because I would focus totally on what I didn’t know, instead of seeing things in perspective.) All this brings me back to a few years ago when I was a contributor on the “One Good Thing” blog (my posts on that blog are here). If you don’t know about that blog, it is a collaborative blog where teachers just write something good — anything good — that happened. Big or small. The tagline to the blog is: “every day may not be good, but there is one good thing in every day.” That’s some powerful stuff. And you know what? Because I was posting on that blog, I had a shift in my mindset. Even in my worst days, especially in my worst days, I would force myself think back through the day for something good. And heck if I couldn’t find something. And then I started paying more attention to the good that was happening when it was happening (I would think: “Heck yes! I need to blog this!”).I wanted my 180 blog to remind me that I do good things in the classroom. Even when I feel like I’m stagnant, when I’m not innovating, when my kids are lost and I’m at fault… I wanted my 180 blog to keep me on the lookout for things that I should feel proud of. Not every post is a “feel good” post on my 180 blog, but the point is: I was constantly on the lookout for something I would want to post about or an image I wanted to save from the day.
• Finally, and probably least important to me, I wanted something to keep me accountable to being a good teacher. This probably sounds a bit weird… but as a regular blogger, I noticed I would get extra enthusiastic about something when I knew I was doing something or creating something and realized I could blog it. When my classroom wasn’t the only audience, and when what we did just disappeared in the temporal aether. Perhaps a 180 blog would help me do the same?

I don’t have any grand pronouncements from the experiment. I definitely didn’t learn anything about teaching from keeping the 180 blog. I am almost certain I will not return to the 180 blog for teaching ideas, or to see how a particular lesson went. I definitely did not become a better teacher because I kept the blog. (At least not in any tangible way.)

But here’s the thing: looking at this experiment on the whole, I am beyond thrilled I started my 180 blog and kept up with it. Why? Because when I have moments (be it days, weeks, or even month-long-stretches) when I feel like I’m not doing a good job, I simply can pull up the blog and browse through it and recognize:

I don’t do the same things every day. I am thoughtful about stuff a bunch of the time. I have pretty great kids who do some pretty great and possibly hilarious things that are worth recording/remembering. 

Which them reminds me: I’m lucky that I get to do what I do. I enjoy thinking about what I get to think about. I really do enjoy working with kids (which definitely needs reminding because… well kids are rarely easy). And that: if this is my job, if this is what I get to do and get paid for it, then things are pretty great.

180 blogs: An idea for the future

So as I noted, I was blogging mainly to archive. And archive I did. I have no desire to archive again next year. However I had been thinking at the TMC14 session I was at: is there anything that could get me to do another 180 blog?

And I dawned on the answer. I could create a 180 blog around one specific thing I was working on as a teacher. And this 180 blog would force me to stay accountable.

Examples:

• I’m not an expert at deep questioning in the math classroom. So I would be forced to blog about one question I asked, if I had time write about some of the context in which the question was asked, and what happened when I asked it in the math classroom. I would then briefly evaluate whether the questioning was good and/or if there was a better way to have asked the question.
• I am trying to make groupwork the central way kids in my classes learn. So I could write one blogpost each day about how I facilitated some part of groupwork — either in the planning of the class, during the class, or after the class.
• I am trying to be more conscientious about formative assessments. So I vow to have one formative assessment each day in one of my classes (not even all of them! just one!). It doesn’t have to be even a big one… even a 10 second “thumbs up if you get this, thumbs to the side if you’re slightly confused, and thumbs down if you’re totally lost” counts.
• I struggle with wait time. So each day, I vow to record with a timer how many seconds I wait after one question (only one question!), and I post the question and the wait time on the blog.
• I know I’m terrible at “closing” class. I have kids work until the end, we rarely take the time to summarize what we did, the big questions we tackled, the big questions we have lingering. Very often it is: “Eeep, sorry, we’re out of time. Check the course conference for your nightly work. Missyouloveyou!” Okay, maybe not the missyouloveyou part, but you know what I’m talking about. So blogging about the close of one class each day.

I’m not saying I’m going to do anything of these. If I do, it will definitely only be one of them. But the idea is that it is targeted about something I want to improve upon, and doing it will hold me accountable.

 

[1] As a follow up, my colleague who did the 180 blog with me blogged many — but not all — days. But heck if he’s not been so inspired that he’s starting Geogebrart, his own blog about making art with geogebra which has been knocking my socks off this summer. Once you peruse his entries on our 180 blog and you peruse his new Geogebrart blog, you probably understand why I feel lucky beyond belief to get to work with this guy!