Blackboard Blogging

Web Journals Become the New Fly on the Wall of Teachers' Lounges

Teachers' weblogs. (The Washington Post)

The teachers' lounge -- that secretive place where, students imagine, teachers sip coffee, smoke and gossip about them -- has gone global.

The blogosphere is the new lounge where teachers gather to talk about vicious administrators, educational reforms both stupid and smart, marriage, divorce and, yes, students.

Especially the ones who wear really inappropriate clothes to proms.

Some are gossipy:

I'm going to Portland for all of next week and leaving my children without me. It feels weird to leave them for a whole week. Not to mention the fact that their sub is going to be this guy that reeks -- and I mean REEKS -- of cigarettes. I seriously have to hold my breath around him because I gag if I don't. . . . The kids are horrified by my abandonment.

-- http://www.firstyearteacher.%20blogspot.com/

Some are rooted in personal, sometimes esoteric opinion:

Yesterday I considered Robby George's argument that marriage is a unitive act of complementary persons. I agree with him. Other strategic minorities in industrial societies do not agree with him.

-- http://gruntledcenter.blogspot.com/

All give teachers a way to be heard as never before.

On one level, blogs are little more than personal journals posted on the Internet for all to see. They provide a forum for teachers to share ideas with colleagues around the world or simply talk about themselves and others. But under a wider lens, the sometimes funny, sometimes searing blogs paint what may be the rawest portrait seen of the teaching profession in transition -- and by some measures, in trouble.