Greg Toppo
USA Today
By Julie Hunter for USA TODAY Lisa Cooper, a fourth-grade teacher at Villa Rica (Ga.) Elementary, has had 5,600 hits since February on her blog, History is Elementary.
Thought process: Cooper uses he husband’s laptop from home at day’s end to update her site.
When the fed-up young teacher decided to quit her job in rural North Carolina in June, her resignation letter was brief — three lines. But she had more to say.
So she spoke her mind online, in an anonymous, 1,000-word Internet posting to her principal that recounted in grim detail racist teachers, obligatory prayers at faculty meetings, “What would Jesus do?” lectures and a “terrible” vice principal who “tries to sleep with the coaches.”
Although all names, including those of the school and city, were withheld, the letter was widely read. For three years, the thirtysomething teacher had been writing a popular Internet weblog, or blog, under the pseudonym First Year Teacher.
She’s one of hundreds of teachers who blog these days, uploading details from their daily lives for a firsthand look at the maddening, exhilarating, often heartbreaking world of the modern public school.
Perhaps because they are so raw and unscripted, teacher blogs — often written anonymously for fear of reprisal — are finding an audience.
Blog tracking website Technorati.com lists 848 teacher blogs; a few boast thousands of hits a week. Bloggers say readers include state or local education officials — even gubernatorial and congressional aides. College education professors have added blogs to aspiring teachers’ reading lists. And, when a school is identified or otherwise known, parents, students and colleagues read them to find out what’s really going on.
“It’s the equivalent of a dispatch from the front lines or a letter written in a foxhole,” says Alexander Russo, a former teacher and congressional education adviser who tracks the trend in his own blog, This Week in Education.
But free speech can get messy. In Winona, Minn., in March, school administrators blocked in-school access to a blog that let teachers and administrators criticize, among others, their superintendent.
A young teacher in Arkansas lost his job after blogging about having to teach wood shop without any equipment.
Another, at Chicago’s Fenger High School, began posting an anonymous blog with unflattering details about the school, including accounts of chaos after kids pulled fire alarms. The pandemonium included vandalism, fistfights, “textbooks, chalk, erasers and people being thrown out of windows” and students smoking pot while leaning against the assistant principal’s car.
Over spring break, students figured out who he was and, fearing for his own safety, he resigned.
But most other blogs are less corrosive affairs.
Lisa Cooper, 44, a teacher in Atlanta who blogs under “elementaryhistoryteacher,” says her blog helps her gather her thoughts and speak for herself.
“As a teacher, I feel like people don’t listen to me. Parents don’t listen to me, politicians don’t listen to me, the media doesn’t listen to me — but everybody tries to tell me how to do my job.”
Like hers, most teacher blogs are little more than personal journals, written as reflections on a tough day, a difficult student or parent or, perchance, a thrilling lesson.
Bloggers post ideas and inspirations — and commiserate when good lessons go bad.
“I read some of these blog posts and I feel like this sort of opens a door for me that would otherwise be shut,” says blogger Joanne Jacobs, author of the 2005 book Our School. She likens bloggers to embedded war correspondents: “They don’t see the whole war, but they see one part very intensely.”
Most blithely mix the personal with the professional. One Tuesday in July, Cooper celebrated her 100th posting — and her husband’s birthday. Her next posting carried a brief tribute to her mother, who had died the previous morning after a lengthy illness.
In that sense, teacher blogs are not unique. A study in July by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 77% of bloggers keep blogs to express themselves creatively, with 37% citing their lives and experiences as their primary topic. An estimated 8% of Internet users, or 12 million U.S. adults, keep a blog, the study said; 55% blog under a pseudonym.
First Year Teacher, who has since moved to Oregon and who still blogs anonymously, says she started her blog to keep up with friends from Teach For America, the elite program that places college graduates in teaching jobs.
First Year Teacher’s blog soon grew into a way to respond to people who had simplistic views about teaching — she says she was disappointed that parents expected, in her words, “the Michelle Pfeiffer version” of a teacher: perky, tenacious, happy-go-lucky.
“You do have moments of wonderful things happening, but it’s a difficult job,” she says.
Her blog is generally cranky, but with moments of humor: “I am on a million committees because that is what English teachers do.”
Jay Bullock, 31, an English teacher in Milwaukee who writes rambles and rants at folkbum.blogspot.com, blogged anonymously for six months beginning in 2003 but ended up going public. “I have a pretty strong union, so I’m not worried about reprisal,” he says.
He blogs to defend public education in general and teachers specifically. “So much of the criticism of education that I read is from people who don’t actually have a good sense of what goes on day-to-day in the classroom,” he says.
Joe Thomas, 37, a high school history teacher in Mesa, Ariz., writes Shut Up and Teach. He calls it “therapeutic” and rarely writes about his classroom. He often writes simply to defend teachers. “Public education does a really good job,” he says. “Warts and all, it’s one of the best things government has ever done.”
But a few teachers write “warts and all” accounts of what goes on in schools — and it isn’t pretty.
In Get Lost, Mr. Chips, Matt Lotti, 25, a substitute teacher in Lehigh Valley, Pa., visits a new school each day and writes about out-of-control teachers and military recruiters following high schoolers through lunch lines. “I feel like I’m in Alice in Wonderland,” he says. “Nobody uses their heads.”
But that approach is dangerous, says blogger Dennis Fermoyle, 55, a Warroad, Minn., history teacher who writes the blog From the Trenches of Public Ed.
“I think sometimes we shoot ourselves in the foot. If you’re in public education, you’ve got to understand that when you do things like that you’re really adding to the load against us. Bad things happen, there’s no question, but a lot of good things happen, too.”
They may make good reading, but do blogs make schools better?
The blogosphere split over that question last spring, when the anonymous teacher-blogger at Chicago’s Fenger High posted a series of rambling, caustic narratives titled Fast Times at Regnef (Fenger spelled backward). He painted a picture of a dangerous, chaotic school where students showed up stoned, skipped class to sell drugs, trashed teachers’ cars and had sex in the hallways.
As it turned out, the blogger, who quit after students learned his identity, was a history teacher who had helped a group of students make it to the county finals of a mock trial competition.
“A lot of kids liked him,” Fenger principal William Johnson says. “He was a popular guy. “
Johnson says that about a third of what was said was true but that he “just tore down a lot of bridges and embarrassed a lot of people.”
In the end, though, the attention “forced us all to take a look at ourselves.” Fenger’s student council started a peer jury for discipline proceedings, and students voted to adopt uniforms for fall semester.
Although Johnson says he doesn’t agree with what the teacher did, “he got the attention of the school community.”