Tag: birthday

Blue Cereal Celebration: Can’t Win Them All

~ Blue Cereal

Can't Reach

It’s very rude of real life to have demanded so much of my time and attention this week. I’d hoped to be far more self-absorbed and celebratory.

We may have to add a second week…

By nature of my own narcissism, I’m mostly celebrating the positives and the wins of the past two years. But we’re closer than that, my Eleven Faithful Followers. Honest. Real. Co-delusional. 

Sometimes my aspirations outreach my ability. While I’ve learned the importance of sleeping on a ‘final draft’ before editing the crap out of it again the next morning, there are also times I realize that if I don’t hit ‘publish’ it’s just not going to happen. 

Sometimes you just have to step off the ledge, whether there’s a bridge there or not. 

Here are five posts I really wanted to work. They may not have become all I’d hoped for them upon conception, but I still like what I was going for. I talk a good game to my students or anyone else taking risks in which they believe – I can’t keep that up unless I’m occasionally willing to do the same myself. 

Dear Student of ColorDear Student of Color… (11/21/14) – That past few years have been quite the awakening for me in terms of just how violent, ignorant, sexist, and racist-hateful-delusional we are as a people. Watching the mental and rhetorical backflips practiced so gleefully by so many in order to feel good about beating up and killing black kids, well… it was sobering. And depressing as hell.

This was my first real effort to process that in writing. It was therapeutic, but never seemed to resonate with anyone outside of myself – which I was eventually O.K. with. 

Not at first, but eventually.

#WhiteSilence, Teacher Edition (1/16/15) – A few months later, still on a steep learning curve when it came to race and privilege, I was trying to understand… things. This one probably should have stayed in the ‘Drafts’ folder until I had a better idea where I was going with it, but sometimes going live isn’t about the piece being ready so much as just… needing to. So I did.

This one is genuinely not very good. Kids, if someone as gifted and daring as Blue can stumble, it’s OK for you to take risks as well. You’re… you’re welcome. 

Revival (8/17/14) – This one wasn’t risky so much as a bit preachy and rambling. Some of the themes I’ve revisited with more success since then, others not so much.

This was nearing the six-month mark of the new blog, and I was still finding my voice. The voice in this post wasn’t what I was going for – it’s more like me after a few beers sitting across the table from someone very good at getting me to talk too much.

I do like the comparison of public education and religious outreach – while not the same, they have much in common, I think.

Stars HockeyOf Hockey Bias and Edu-Paradigms (10/17/15) – I may have been too close to this one to be objective. I also suspect that anytime I mention hockey, or music, or any other specific about which readers aren’t personally passionate, I lose the masses before my larger point fully manifests. That’s on me as the writer, of course, but it hasn’t seemed to stop me from doing it – repeatedly.

I thought I was making a pithy point about perspective and relationship and perception. I think I just seemed to ramble about hockey. I can live with either.

Waiting To Follow The Worms (3/2/16) – I know, crazy recent, right? One benefit of having done this for a while is that I’m not as regularly surprised by what works and what doesn’t. This one was difficult to write, partly because it was rather personal and partly because I was insecure the entire time that I sounded melodramatic and a bit foolish. It was also nearly twice as long in draft form, which is never a good thing. 

There are things I really like in this one, and I’m glad I posted it, but I knew when I hit ‘publish’ that it wasn’t exactly going viral or doing what I wish I had the power to do. But I’m OK with that most days, and I’m beyond appreciative that you are, too. 

This week of Blue Cereal Celebration is rapidly drawing to a close, and we haven’t talked about magnets or my personal favorite posts of all time forever hallelujah yay. Hmmm… I’d better get on that.

BCE Magnet

Blue Cereal Celebration: Forgotten Favorites

~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

The Blue Cereal Celebration Continues!

Cared ForA few days ago I shared the Top 10 most-viewed pages of my prestigious two-years of bloggery and webbifying. It was magical for all of us, I believe.

Sadly, not every post is a viral sensation. One of the tragedies of this mortal coil is that some of my favorite pieces never really gained much traction. Perhaps I failed to fully communicate what I intended, or perhaps the subjects simply didn’t resonate with enough readers. Maybe they just sucked.

Nevertheless, I remember them fondly. Now you can, too.

My Five Favorite Posts Not In The Top 10… or Top 50… or Top 89…

The JerkAll I Need Is This Lamp… (3/27/14) – My second post ever, and the first to garner attention and kind words from some of the legit bloggers (I believe Rob Miller was the first to share it – I nearly wet myself.) While a bit under-developed by later standards, I like it’s point and what I was going for. It’s also the fist time I incorporated primary sources, something that never does catch on but which I so thoroughly enjoy it’s not likely to stop any time soon. Plus, there’s a clip from “The Jerk” – a trifecta of blogging potential. 

Tortoise and HareUseful Fictions, Part II – The Stories We Tell Ourselves (5/3/14) – I used to end up doing these multi-part series on a theme… while there are things I liked about that, in retrospect I wonder if they’re indicative of my inability to get to the point as much as anything. My eleventeen part series on ‘useful fictions’ had potential, however – enough to justify recreating them after the Russian attack in November 2014.

This particular post is the first time I remember a peer from my mostly real life – someone much smarter and better looking than me – bringing up something I’d written and complimenting it. I believe she told me she’d used it with her teachers during a workshop. It was an experience I’m thankful to have enjoyed with a variety of folks smarter and better looking than me since then, and it never ceases to be far more gratifying than wealth or fame.

I assume. I’d be willing to try wealth and fame just to compare, but I’m still pretty sure the results would be the same.

Koko the GorillaKoko The Gorilla (7/7/14) – The next two posts on this ‘Forgotten Favorites’ list involve striving to understand or express things beyond ourselves and our previous experiences. Ironically, that may be why they didn’t quite catch on – I may have been reaching beyond what I had the talent to express. But so be it – this is still one of my all-time favorites of anything I’ve written. I’m ridiculously proud of it whether anyone else ever gets it or not. 

That’s the great thing about getting old (what, you don’t think two years is ancient in blogger years?) – you can just think what you think and say what you say. For instance: “Bite me, Jay.”

Fables of the ReconstructionLearning R.E.M. (9/15/15) – This post wasn’t really about R.E.M. Well, OK – it was, but not really about them so much as it was about my learning how to listen to R.E.M. and how dramatically that changed everything else forever on every level in every realm. 

Which sounds a bit overstated, I guess. But that’s what was tricky about this post.

I wanted to use my experience with a very different kind of music to explore the challenge of exposing students to great literature, or history, or mathy-sciency things, in ways that drag them into the light just enough for the natural awesomeness of knowlege-beauty-truth-chasing-learn-wanting to take hold. It doesn’t happen easily, or often, but that’s kinda what we’re always going for, isn’t it? I thought?

Exactly one month later, I wrote what was in many ways the exact same post with something that hadn’t become life-altering for me, but instead was a big deal to one of my students. I thought that time maybe I’d nailed it, but to this day it has less than 100 views of over 30 seconds. That’s not a complaint, it’s just interesting.

Unlike the post, apparently.

UrinalsLet’s Talk About Urinals (11/22/15) – This one was fairly recent, meaning it received more attention than earlier posts (I’m blessed to have quite a few more followers than not long ago), but I’d still hoped it would do more than it did. In my childish, yet sophisticated, internal rubric, it’s the perfect balance of catchy title, abrasive humor, and actual analysis of current edu-foolery – in this case, our tendency to substitute grandstanding and rhetoric for actual change or improvement. 

If you’re willing to pretend there’s something on this site you believe to be underrated and worthy of international acclaim, and you’re willing to Tweet it out or Facebook it – and tag me so I notice – I still have a very few coveted #11FF mugs left which I’m getting rid of THIS WEEK. They can’t be bought, except with flattery and schmoozing – just ask anyone who already has one. 

DON’T WORRY – WE’RE NOT DONE! THE CELEBRATION CONTINUES ALL WEEK!