1. Don’t snark? Aren’t you often the king (or at least the prince) of snark?

“I find myself gut-checking myself before I post anything or even sit down to write, wondering who will come out of the woodwork interested only in pushing me off balance. Speaking creatively and intellectually, comments here are an unhealthy diet. I think if I can’t reconcile their value, I need to a) ignore them entirely or b) shut them off.”

2. Hey, the Social Web’s a rough and tumble place. Hearing folks say that your post is ‘ho hum,’ that you’re ‘dangerously innumerate,’ or worse is no fun sometimes but also can be good for one’s ego. When did you get such a thin skin? Marriage isn’t turning you soft, is it?

P.S. My tags suck. Don’t even bother looking for them…

I think your general point, teachers need to read more than just stuff related to their profession is a good point. I’ve been in two fields, business and education. There were a lot of business majors at my undergrad college similar to the folks I ended up working with in banking. They were a pretty incurious bunch. There were a few of us with Liberal Arts type degrees (I had one boss who had majored in Geography and another that did French before she got her MBA). I did not have tons of intellectual discussions in the break room. Fast forward to teaching. Some of my colleagues do read novels, but I’ve run across a some like my old college friend’s former in-laws. Dad was an elementary principal, they had NO books in the house except the Bible, and no other reading material besides Christian Life magazine. That’s sad. Even an interest in crafts and knitting (I like the later) would show some creativity. I don’t want to be that principal, and I don’t think it’s good if most educators are like that.

I think that was your general point, if I’m mistaken, I apologize. I think the delicious tag metaphor was a bit limiting, but hey you can bowl a strike every time or for every reader.

I prefer dissent to agreement. But preferable to both of these is expansive dissent and expansive agreement, the opposites of which are, respectively, snarky nitpicking and mindless backpatting, neither of which do anything, intellectually, to get me off.

What’s killing my buzz lately is the subsection of dissenting commenters who only come by to dissent, though even this isn’t so bad. Tom Hoffman’s unique purpose around these parts is to stop by and tell me I’m full of shit but Tom does me some service here by:

a) disagreeing with the thesis I intended, not a straw man he imagined;
b) expanding on his own argument with either i) a helpful hyperlink, ii) a few sentences analyzing or expanding on his own counterargument, iii) on occasion, a follow-up post on his blog.

I’m not interested in chasing anybody away here but if ground rules like 1) don’t snark; 2) don’t nitpick; 3) don’t set straw men ablaze; 4) be useful; are too stringent, please, by all means, invest your time and comments somewhere else. And I know that a great many people and bloggers value Ken’s constructive commentary, commentary which I have found he chooses to withhold in this forum more often than not.

Time was, comments pushed me forward, inspired my follow-up posts. Lately, though, it’s the opposite; they impede my writing. I find myself gut-checking myself before I post anything or even sit down to write, wondering who will come out of the woodwork interested only in pushing me off balance. Speaking creatively and intellectually, comments here are an unhealthy diet. I think if I can’t reconcile their value, I need to a) ignore them entirely or b) shut them off.

again, i figure that there must be more to this because i so rarely find myself disagreeing with you, dan. i know i’m not so active usually in comment threads, but i’ve been lurking here continuously since that four slide contest way back when. i enjoy your honesty and passion.

Good luck with your book. You’re a talented writer, and apparently, either too esoteric for me, or I bring meaningless and tangential analysis to all the wrong parties.

What tags do you want to see? Should school districts peruse tags to determine if candidates are interesting, diverse, and dynamic?

It’s hard not to skim past comments bylined “ken” when you insist, as a matter of policy, on inflating any broad-pointed thesis of mine past the point of absurdity.

The answer to both your questions should be evident to anyone who didn’t come here bent toward the contrary: “I dunno.” Should I apologize also for not considering how this single wordless post should inform national policy on teacher retention and pay? Is this sort of sniping really fun for you?

On the other hand, I would be interested in your soberminded assessment of my two suppositions above, which make it pretty obvious I’m not aiming at national policymaking here.