Conversations

It's been a long time since I've regularly kept a blog, but it was once my primary hobby. I started a personal blog in my last semester of high school and over the course of the next five years proceeded to pour my heart out to the internet on a near-daily basis. Some statistics about that blog:

Blog entries: 2,537

Comments posted: 36,507

Comments received: 25,860

I think it's fair to say I've had some practice.

Most striking, in my opinion, is that I spent most of that "blogging" time actually commenting - that is, having conversations. Conversations about anything, from The X-Files (Mulder and Scully 4eva!) to existential teenage angst to Obama's first election to "boys are stupid!" You know, typical girl stuff. But through those conversations I found a whole network of friends, stretching across the country and, indeed, the globe, some of whom would come to feel like family. Reading those conversations now is like taking a trip in the Tardis (beware, there be geekery in this blog) and watching my young self fumble her way through adolescence and young adulthood. It's also seeing those who helped her along that stumbling path and gradually made her steps more sure. They were, in many ways, some of my best teachers.

Which brings me to a comment our illustrious instructor, Rory, made on the first day of class:

“Teaching is relationships. If you don’t have relationships, you don’t have anything.”

This idea, or some version of it, has been on my mind since I made the decision to pursue a career in teaching. One of the reasons I think (hope) (really really hope) that I might be a good high school teacher is that I feel I can make connections with young people. My own emotionally torturous high school experience, and the memories of who helped me through it (my actual HS teachers are high on the list), gives me a sense that I might be able to understand, or at least empathize with, kids who are drowning in the mire of hormones and uncertainty that characterizes adolescence. And I know, from first-hand experience, what serves as the best lifeline in those times: relationships. Conversations. Anything that makes you realize that someone cares, that someone has noticed you. Rachel's speech about this very topic in Ed Psych today brought me to the edge of tears. I know what it's like to feel completely alone, and I know what it feels like when someone turns on a light and says "I see you."

I was lucky enough that many people turned on that light for me. And those people mostly fell into two categories: my teachers, and my friends from that mysterious World Wide Web. Therefore, the intersection of technology and teaching is an extremely intriguing space for me. I see the enormous potential of the internet to start conversations that stretch far beyond the classroom. Perhaps I could connect my chemistry class with another one that has different resources from mine, and they could communicate about experiments and projects. Perhaps I could invite scientists into my classroom via video chat, providing my students with a glimpse into the real world of science. The possibilities are endless.

I understand the concern that "plugging in" a classroom could be harmful to the teacher-student relationship, or open a Pandora's box of distractions. But I also see the potential for technology, particularly the internet, to serve as another way to emphasize relationships. I would of course take care to cultivate my own relationships with my students, but I feel that opening the door to even more could be a wonderful boon. Maybe they could start their own blogs and find friends, like I did, in the most unexpected places.



A couple notes about my blog title and URL:

• I have chosen to honor my many years of bloggery by taking up my old habit of using song lyrics as my blog title. Currently (and subject to change), I am using "This whole world inside" from the song All Good Things by Mandy Moore (she's done a couple amazing albums in the last few years, nothing like the bubblegum Britney-clone pop she became famous for!).
• "Purplegoboom" is a reference to the time that my high school chemistry memories came in very handy in a real chemistry lab. Some of you may remember a demonstration commonly done in high school in which you make nitrogen triiodide by mixing ammonia and iodine. Nitrogen triiodide is a dark purple compound that is stable when wet, but as soon as it dries out, it is an extremely sensitive contact explosive. You let a small sample dry on filter paper, stand as far away as you can, then tap it gently with the end of a meter stick, and it goes BOOM! A few years later, I was working in an organic chemistry lab in college and one of my reactions included both ammonia and iodine. I noticed that instead of producing a white solid as it should, the reaction turned dark purple. The dots connected in my head and I thought "Uh oh. Boom!" I ran to my advisor and told him what had happened, and asked how to deal with it. He said "Oh dear... I don't know! Look it up!" Luckily, the omniscient Google told me that I could quench the compound with ethanol, then pour it down the drain. The point of the story is that high school chemistry saved me from a potentially nasty surprise if I had attempted to dry down the strange purple product, as is standard practice after running a reaction. Huzzah for high school chemistry!