Welcome to the first edition of my blog Spitballin’: A School of Thought, or maybe just Spitballin’ for short. If you are reading this, then it’s a good chance you already know me personally; whether good or bad, as the author of A Memoir of a Mediocre Teacher, or both.
This is my first foray into the blogosphere. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I would ever be writing up my thoughts and putting them out there for the world to see, but here we are.
Starting to write a blog really wasn’t a choice. Writing the book came with a lot of unexpected expectations. One of them is to apparently stay relevant (I know, I actually have to become relevant first), and to do that, the experts say, is to write a continual blog. I honestly thought blogs were a thing of the past. I never really took time to read anyone’s blog, frankly because I never found nor took the time to find anything I was interested in. But again, here I am, writing these blogs out in thinking somebody is going to be reading these!
As for the name of this blog, Spitballin’, comes from what most of us know of somebody who is just spitballing ideas for the sake of conversation. The conversation topics that are going to be mainly covered in this blog will deal with the goings-on in the education field. It isn’t really going to be anything hard hitting that I’m foreseeing, but what the hell, there just might be a topic that I may be really agitated about and will want to express my take on that issue, and yes, that take could very well be a terrible one!
I’m not an expert at most things in the education field, by far. I am a reading interventionist, so there will be some talk about topics on the state of reading, which I do have quite a bit on my mind and am looking forward to sharing with you whether you will agree or not on a particular stance. Not all blogs are going to be a soap-box speech, as there will be some fun, trying, embarrassing, and successful (there won’t be many on that!) recollections of what happened in my teaching career.
Other blogs that will potentially be released will be about the trials and tribulations of going into the arena of writing and publishing. While teaching is my first job, writing now has barged ahead as a new part-time job. I’m not saying it’s a job in the sense of it being a grind, as the exciting part of it is when you feel the ideas starting to flow from the brain and there is something materializing. More of the grind comes when you are actually done with the slop of the first draft and you have to clean up all the splatter surrounding what is actually salvageable.
Writing these blogs, I’m thinking, will be similar to when I first started out writing the book, which being a first-time writer of an actual manuscript, was like barely getting the plane over the mountains on takeoff. Hopefully, as the blogs move forward, they will start to have some cohesion to them.
I will be having these blogs coming out monthly, give or take a few days from the last. Unless, there is something extremely pressing that needs to be put out that you, the reader, and the tens of others that will be chomping at the bit to see what this spitballer has to say.
Until then, keep on reading!
BC