I’ve taken the plunge and assigned blogging to my students in American Lit. There are twelve budding scholars in that class – just enough, I thought, to stage a little blog experiment.

I was giddy as I handed out the guidelines for the blogs. I told the students that it was my dream to do this assignment; that in starting their Crucible blogs they would be fulfilling my wildest instructional dream.

They thought this was pathetic, but they humored me – I felt a thrill when I logged in to my official teaching blog and saw nine new comments. They were instructed to post their URLs in my comments section, and sure enough, they have.

I think it’ll be a whole new kind of discussion we’ll have about literature out here in cyberspace. I’m sure of it, in fact.

And, just in case the discussion is altogether TOO new, I think I best get their usernames and passwords. I’ve decided that censorship is okay when it has the potential to save my job.