I’m humbled and excited when I read through all these. My friend whom I speak at conferences with actually sat in on your Asilomar session this year. Kinda cool actually.

I normally blog, but I had never thought to blog about teaching until recently. Now, I feel like a little girl trying to get into the big league of edubloggers.

I’ve been reading math blogs for about a year. Before 1.5 years ago, I had no idea I would be really teaching math (degree in special ed…I could’ve gotten many different kinds of jobs…)…I was *thrilled* when I found your blog, f(t) and samjshah…oh, and Jackie B, too, all around the same time.

I am a lurker…I read but don’t often comment. I take it all in and then go talk to my colleagues about it (and get funny looks for talking about my *blog friends* again).

Anyway, thanks to twitter, I recently started a teaching blog myself, but haven’t gotten it too far off the ground. I credit you all for the name of my blog as well as the courage to start it.

I’m always shocked when I find a new blog, but I know I shouldn’t be. There are so many teachers out there, there is boung to be good blogging, right?

I see myself as leaning toward the reform end of that spectrum, and some of my favorite bloggers definitely lean the other way.

I think us math teachers are so hungry for these exchanges that we don’t separate ourselves by philosophy so much as folks would in other arenas.

When I made the jump to middle school, I had a bunch of tech “aha’s”. Before, my tech questions consisted of “Vis-a-vis or Expo?” But because our school was trying to implement the “new shiny stuff” I had to do a bunch of self teaching. This led me to Richard Byrne’s blog (http://www.freetech4teachers.com/). From there I learned about GeoGebra and MathCasts (http://math247.pbworks.com/). It turns out that one of the best people to know for learning GeoGebra and the guy who basically created mathcasts are siblings. (Tim Fahlberg and Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska)

Anyway, this mathcast/GeoGebra thing got me looking all over for other resources which led me to Classroom 2.0. One day I asked a question about how to engage the advanced student and I was told by Nancy Bosch that maybe I was asking the wrong questions. She suggested that I look up this guy from Santa Cruz who is asking a bunch of good questions too.

From here I started reading Kate, Jackie, Sam, Nick Herschman and Dan Greene. Noticed a bunch of “Follow me on Twitter” on people’s blogs and thought I’d see what that was all about. One of my first tweets was something like “Trying to figure out how to use this Twitter thing” to which @k8nowak replied “me too.” So I thought, “Ok someone who knows her way around this stuff has questions too.” This led to my blog Questions? and now I’m a complete mess.

Thanks guys.

As for the Lost island? Yeah, I wonder if there are ‘others.’ I get the feeling that this is a pretty closed system, though. You follow enough links and you start to recognize the scenery again.

I started reading your blog at the beginning stages, and had a bit of an educrush on it/you and a few others. I don’t know if it was my very first math teacher blog I read, but it was always the first I went to visit. I loved the idea of talking about on-the-ground-god-to-honest *practice.* I also loved reading about everyday teaching stories. It just got me excited about the possibilities.

I have a terrible memory but I believe that others that I at that time read included

Mr. K at Math Stories [http://blog.mathsage.com/],
3 Standard Deviations from the Left [http://threestandarddeviationstotheleft.blogspot.com/],
JD2718 [http://jd2718.wordpress.com/],
Dan Greene at The Exponential Curve [http://exponentialcurve.blogspot.com/],
Kilian Betlach at Teaching in the 408 [http://roomd2.blogspot.com/],
On The Tenure Track [http://awaitingtenure.wordpress.com/]

So at some point, actually not too long after lurking and commenting, I decided to start my own blog. The month before I started my first day of teaching. I wanted to be brutally honest and chronicle a lot of my everyday thoughts and frustrations, so I kept it private. But the more I kept on engaging with reading everyone else’s stuff, the more I wanted to put some of my thoughts/experiences out there. So I went public — of course only back-publishing the posts that were kosher to share.

What’s great is that I have chronicled my teaching experience from *before* I entered the classroom until today. I wonder what I will think about what I wrote 5 or 10 years from now.

I don’t know what generation I would be, but I’m so glad that new blogs seem to be exploding. Of course, that’s going to make it even harder for me to keep up, and soon I’m going to have to make decisions about who to jettison. Sigh. A depressing thought.

Sam

For myself, I first started following blogs that I randomly came across, and I stayed if I found something interesting that kept me. Many times it was the writing. The writing was unique, full of voice, or inspirational. Often times the blogger reinforced my ideas or presented them in a new way. Rarely did I, or still do, read blogs that contradict my own beliefs.

Blogs can become Lost islands. It would be interesting to investigate how and why blogs and groups of blogs become islands.

2. All the time! Sometimes I stumble onto a blog, who knows how, and wonder where the heck it’s been all my life.