Stephen Downes, off Graham Wegner’s lament:

Find an area that you’re interested in, blog on it, daily, and then keep doing it for ten years, even when it seems out of fashion, even when it seems like your influence is waning and other people’s stars are rising. Reflect your reading, your learning, your developing understanding of the field. Stay true to your own values, and don’t relent when it looks like you’ve peaked.

If I go a week without blogging, that wobbly, nagging feeling I get owes less to an obligation I have to an audience and more to the fact that this is the place where I learn and an outlet for my excitement. If I don’t blog for a week, then either a) I haven’t learned enough, b) I haven’t been excited by enough, or c) I haven’t carved out enough time to keep that learning and excitement cycling through my brain. Blogging, in any of those cases, is a nice way to step on the intellectual scale and take a reading.

If you haven’t caught John Siracusa’s essay by now, odds are good you aren’t interested. It’s essential reading, though, for anyone trying to connect blogging to serious professional development and not, say, to an abnormally supportive faculty lounge where everyone shares your exuberance and thinks your last post was great.

Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with.

Elsewhere, he describes criticism as “a virtuous cycle created through apparent viciousness” which is exactly how I would describe last month’s (very satisfying) Darren-Dan-Jason slide remix.

For my part, after some large missteps and a lot of reconsideration, I am finally comfortable with this blog’s critical stance. It turns out not to be terribly difficult to respect an individual and her serious commitment to teaching while at the same time holding her work up for serious scrutiny. I’d argue, even, that the two are equivalent, that, issues of tact notwithstanding, to offer any less to each other is the real disrespect.

Some may find this abrasive and check out but my remaining commenters, unsurprisingly, are a seriously critical bunch and keep me relentlessly on message, forcing me to justify and rejustify my crackpot pedagogy. And, most days, I’m pretty sure that’s all the professional development I need.

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It was the National Day of Silence today while it was the Tax Day Tea Party two days ago. As participating students filed into my classroom, I was struck by their facial expressions. Some were appropriately solemn and reflective. Others stifled smiles, their silence just an affectation, protesting for the sake of protest. There were also provocateurs, students looking to undermine anything that gave the impression of sincerity.

Mostly, I was struck by the bijection between student protesters and adult protesters. Every fringe or mainstream character you’d find at a tea party you’d also find in my sixth period classroom, only smaller and a little more obvious about their motivations.

Khoi Vinh is the design director for the New York Times online. He has written a tremendous piece about the state of online design criticism that mirrors my assessment of the state of online teacher criticism down to the last word:

Sometimes I wonder, then: given that everyone in design seems to more or less know everyone else, are we really having the kinds of meaningful, constructive, critical discourses that we really should be having? Are we too quick to take offense at the opinions of our peers? Or are we pulling our punches too much when discussing the merits of the work that our peers turn out? To put a finer point on it: are we being honest with one another?

Paul Krugman:

What Eichengreen-O’Rourke show, it seems to me, is that knowledge is the only thing standing between us and Great Depression 2.0. It’s only to the extent that we understand these things a bit better than our grandfathers – and that we act on that knowledge – that we have any real reason to think this time will be better.

Fat times for social studies teachers right now. Just wait until The Great Protractor War of 1875 revives itself. Then it’ll be our turn.