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March 04, 2005
The future of personal blogging in this space
In a previous existence, I did a lot of very personal and very public blogging. It's out there now, I'm not going to delete any of it, and I stand behind a lot of those takes. I may even reproduce a couple of those old posts here, they were written at a time when who I was becoming was crystallizing. Posts on vocation and on fighting loneliness are particularly significant to me.
I'm going to do my best to let you into those corners of my world now as well. But there will be limitations. To wit:
- My wife was never that comfortable with how open I was about family life on this thing, and I now have daughters that are getting advanced in teenaged years. There may be some token bits on parenting that turn up here, or on my struggles to be husband/father, but I'm going to err on the side of clamming up there.
- I'm under the employment of Shorter College. I kind of like the money I get from them for services rendered. I really don't want to leave. I really don't want to say anything here that jeopardizes my future here. So, if you want some good dirt on what it's really like to be a faculty member around here, move along, nothing to see here. I will tell you nothing outside of the fact that I love it here, I have the greatest job in the world, and everybody's 17-21 year old kids should take out massive student loans if necessary just to come to Shorter College and get a dose of our obviously superior flavor of higher education.
- I don't want to dredge up old, bad memories of my previous employer, either. And I know some of you will want me to. The older I get, the more I have the take that I have to take responsibility for the fact that I only lasted in my previous gig three years. And I have to do whatever necessary to make sure this gig lasts a bit longer.
- And about current students - I already work in eternal fear that there's going to be certain people on campus who think that a student set already has their A's and I have it in for another student set and that Pearson plays favorites. Actually talking about students in this forum would be dangerous in that regard. I want to do everything I can to make everybody believe that my office door is wide open, and I'm willing to talk to anybody at any time about anything.
Of course, the single thing that makes this job the greatest on the planet is the students I have who are willing to come in or get on the instant messenger and share their ideas and their academic needs and their fears - and, ultimately, their lives - with me. It's one of the greatest honors on the planet. Hopefully I'm going to be able to write about what I'm getting from students without actually writing overly-specifically about the students themselves.
So that's a lot of limitation. I'll probably stick as much to ideas as I do to talking about people. I have a lot of ideas running around right now anyway.
The last time I started doing this, I had a list of people I blamed. There are additional people to blame for this iteration - I'll simply say that they know who they are, and thanks for that.
But Jeff, thanks for the space, guy. I'm going to try to make this thing work long-term.
Posted by Chuck at March 4, 2005 10:39 PM