It’s well after 10, rounding the corner towards 11 actually, and it’s a Thursday and it’s late enough in the week where overwork shows in the corners and bags under my eyes. On the stereo Albert Ayler is blowing open heaven and I look at the papers to grade and reading to read and I try to squeeze Robert Frost’s words to fit my own minor apocalypse, because I have pages to write before I sleep/pages to write before I sleep.

I think about the backlog of calls I need to return and the emails that me-me-me for attention. In my ears still echo the words heard earlier this evening when President Obama told me, “You did that” as he helped proclaim the progress made in the country with regards to jobs, to energy, to education.

My rss feed buzzes with reminders of the trickling in blogposts I’ve assigned. Student work getting done late into the evening. My tired eyes skim and it seems like every other post is a self-exploration into the need to blog. It’s polished vehemence about having to write publicly, about writing words because some professor for some required course is making us write a helluva lot about I-don’t-know-what and I have to if I want to get a decent grade and be a decent member of society, about inspiration and  writers block and that menacing blinking and impatient cursor that snarls for you to get on with it already. [For the record, I am really thrilled with the posts and vlogs my students have made.]

All of this preamble is to say, I understand the tensions my students are voicing. Having to blog kind of sucks. The increasingly slower trickle of content on my site, for instance, is likely an indication that other commitments have taken me away from informal online chatter (and even, briefly, away from War and Peace and Cats). However, when I think about what I learned and what I taught, I think I was perpetually practicing. I was shown, as an 8^th and 9^th and 10^th and 11^th and 12^th grader how to write the evil five paragraph essay. I was shown and practiced how to do this so I could eventually break the rules of five paragraph essaydom and, like, do something different within the essay format. Likewise, as an 11^th grade teacher, my students and I practiced mimicking the work of Anna Deavere Smith so that we could look at how writing can help distill, facilitate, and shape local political discourse. When students do work in a class, isn’t that about practice for something bigger? Sure, that may not mean being a professional blogger, but it may mean staying afoot in the tricky landscape of educational policy, it may mean being able to understand and convey a point of view, and it may mean having to advocate through words and actions.

I’ve been called into too many principals’ offices too many times during my years as a teacher and had to call in my union representative (usually my good friend Travis … one in that aforementioned long list of folks I need to call) to know that being able to articulate and to provide evidence for an argument about the needs of my students is not only about CYAing but about leading as an advocate for students and for a profession that is contested.

I think this post is more to psyche myself up for the continual challenge of loving the teaching profession and loving–unconditionally–the students we face each day. As my students and I struggle to figure out how to produce and communicate, I wonder if we need to step back and create an education-focused Ze Frank-like invocation.

As a final note, in my Adolescents’ Literature course this week, we’ve been reading John Green’s Looking For Alaska. I wonder if, like the protagonist of LFA, my students and I should think about this journey as one towards understanding teaching, education, and the future our classrooms hold as another inquiry into the “great perhaps.”