A year ago last week, I posted my first blog entry.  At that point, I had barely slept in 2 months. I was in my second semester of teaching, was working overtime to keep up with 2 groups of students in 4 preps, and spent most nights reading the archives of some teacher-blogging superheroes.  My jaw was permanently dropped because they were writing about things that I didn’t think were possible in a classroom.

By now, every one of those unreachable-seeming icons of genius pedagogy have commented here at least once, and I’ve met dozens more.  My blogroll has over 100 entries.  I can’t believe the amount of one-on-one coaching I’ve gotten from people all over the continent.  This amount and quality of feedback, modelling, and trenchant questioning was not available to me anywhere else.

Thank you for your support, for your critiques, for your suggestions of papers and books and workshops and videos and apps and sundry other ways to fill those hours between 5PM and 7AM.  To those on whose blogs I have hashed out my angst in unreasonably long comments, extra thanks.  I am finally starting to teach in a way that I respect, and I couldn’t have dreamt it, let alone done it, without you.

If you are reading this and wondering if you should start a blog, I would say go for it.  It doesn’t cost anything to try; if it doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to follow through.  But the return on investment is so high that I bet you’ll be hooked.  If you’re still unsure, write to a fairly new blogger (yours truly, for example) and fire some questions at them.  Chances are you’ll find what you need.  I sure did.