Although blogging is viewed as a new innovative way to get students writing, it’s creating the same sense of boredom as with all the writing styles before us.
Blog
n. A website that displays postings by one or more individuals in chronological order and usually has links to comments on specific postings.
n. (Computer Science) a journal written on-line and accessible to users of the internet. Full name: weblog
n. a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style
Blogs have become a weirdly diverse form of media. No guidelines and no limitation, and this could be because ‘blogging’ was never taught in school. Nobody gave students a layout to a good blog post, taught them a five-step process in making a blog. People probably loved the freedom. Now, however, we are using blogging in school. Throughout our time in future forums we are told to write out blogs as informal essays, with a thesis and a strong argument. We are told that the key to a good blog is a point that requires debate. Here’s the thing about our ‘blogs’; we’ve been forcing the concept of a blog into a nice square box we call ‘classroom.’ With that came nobody wanting to go home and write a strongly worded blog post. Just like nobody wants to go home and write an essay.
Perhaps this is why blogs dropped in popularity. People turned to vlogging, or to the microblogging formats of social media sites. Our teachers decided to turn it into education and people got bored. I, personally, don’t know a single person in my age demographic who avidly reads a blog. Is it because kids just don’t care? Maybe, but more likely we've just jumped to the newest form of media. When the school board jumps onto things, surprise, the people lose interest.
So what though? We aren't writing blogs to attract hordes of dedicated readers. No! We are writing blogs to improve our writing while still writing about what we students care about! But that’s the thing, we know these blogs count for something, and we know that our teachers expect something. They expect a thousand words, a good thesis. They also expect creativity. With blogging, and anything to do with school, there is this fear of failure. You have to impress one person. You have to appeal specifically to one person’s opinion. There is no room for creativity in that situation. No, in that situation there is only room for faking it. Blogging creates a fun divide between writing about what we want to (ex. The Kardashians, the porn industry, bathroom etiquette) and what our teacher actually probably wants us to talk about (ex. Probably politics, failing school systems, anything that was ever a TED talk). No matter how many times we are told to write about what we like, we know what we like won’t carry us to the kind of things that are expected.
And now the teachers are in turmoil! “We want you to express yourself,” they scream. OK, theoretical teachers! Here is how a blog post would go if I wrote a blog how I wanted, about what I wanted:
Kim Kardashian is more important than you think, and you hating on her proves it.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Actually, that could be a really good blog post.” And you’re right. It could be a good blog post if I began to talk about the media, our ideas of people versus their own self, and stuff like that. However, I don’t want to write about that because I don’t actually care about that. I want to talk about being her best friend or write a thousand words about having Kris Jenner (I think she actually changed her name) as my mom. I don’t believe everything has to be an argument and if I want to talk about something I like, I don’t want to bend it to fit somebody else’s idea of how I should tackle the topic.
If I write blogs the way I’m supposed to write blogs, they feel insincere. They feel as insincere as the three paragraph essays. In just 2 short months I've lumped “Future Forums blog post” in “Things I could fake for the mark” along with other essays, newspaper articles, poems, and pretty much all the other writing I've done for school. The faking makes these tasks tedious because my mind wanders to all the things I actually care about. Even this blog is written about something I don’t care about. My mind has been wandering to things like “I wonder how many words I could write about Hayley Williams hair” My eyes have flashed to the word count every couple of seconds in an attempt to squeeze 1000 words from my apathy.
Or maybe it’s my own apathy that makes blogs so tedious. I don’t care. I fake care and then when that fake care turns into real care, I stop caring. I fake cared about blogs until I started caring about them for school and now I don’t care. I can’t find it in me to care about things in a non-sarcastic way. If that’s the issue, however, I would have just written a bunch of words that don’t matter.
Back to the point, blogging for school takes an open-ended media and creates edges, and pressures. Once we put blogging into the school system, the school system works its blood sucking magic. Or at least by the time the school system hopes on board the activity has already lost its mass public appeal. Either way, getting us to write informal essays and calling them blogs does not make the groans any quieter or the collective chant of excuses any less persistent. Like watching your mom twerk, it loses its appeal faster than you can throw a towel over her. I guess that’s the nature of the education beast.
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