Taking a Minute to Reflect
It’s been about 4 weeks since I finally took the jump and started this blog. I created various Google Docs for planning and had several notes in my phone about different topics and writing ideas. It was something I talked about for a long time, but never really got off the ground until just recently.
I never had real reason not to do it, but I put it off for so long. Why?
I’m a daydreamer. When I come up with ideas I fantasize about them and think about all of the details of how things will play out. For my blog, I pictured staying on top of my writing schedule, busting out content, and having conversations with my large reader audience. I saw it bringing me professional connections and maybe even ideas for writing a book. My fantasy made me excited at the prospect of starting a blog.
I used my list of ideas to start writing. I thought about how I wanted to order the different topics I had and determined a writing schedule for myself to keep myself consistent. After going through the draft of my first post for about the third time, it came time to finally publish, but I froze. I returned to my fantasy and realized how unrealistic it was. How the outcomes I pictured could possibly never come true. My thoughts continued on like that until I left that draft unpublished. When I made the decision to return back to it and take the leap, I saw that that draft was sitting there for a year. A whole year!
The fear of the unknown kept me from publishing that first blog post. Maybe real-life outcomes aren’t anything like fantasies. They’re real life. And by staying so focused on my fantasy world, I lost sight of the real world and lost a year of not writing and publishing in the process. So when I look back on this first month of writing, I’m pretty proud of it and myself.
In reflecting on my goals in my Introduction post and the purpose I set out for this blog, I realized that what I’ve been writing about is more than what I originally set out to accomplish. I truly love teaching history. It’s my passion. It brightens my day when I get my students excited about any aspect of history. And while I still want to share my different ideas about teaching history, various learning activities, assessments, and other, I see that what I have so far is something else.
I knew I wanted to structure my blog posts in a way that would reflect the timing of the school year so that I could share my “being a teacher” experiences as they happened. Being a teacher is hard and going through a new school year, especially if it’s your first, can be challenging. I remember the first days at my first job, and sometimes it’s so easy to feel like you’re alone out there. After some thought, I realized that I wanted to write about these experiences so that people also going through these moments wouldn’t have to feel so alone. That maybe having someone to relate to would bring some comfort and conversation.
I want Standing on Desks to be about more than just creative learning and teaching history. It’s about teaching, but it’s also about the challenges. It’s about the ups and downs that come with the job. This difficult, exhausting, incredible, rewarding, and life-changing job.
