Must. Read: 21-year-old on Slow Blogging
Monday, 8 December 2008 Clay Burell 
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Before I turn this post over to a new 21-year-old voice I find worth listening to, a bit of background:
He followed me on Twitter. I went to his Twitter page to check him out, followed its link to his blog, skimmed it to get a sense of this guy. Mostly short posts, random-seeming. The Captain Beefheart music video was what stopped me from leaving. That spoke to an original sensibility and taste, and prompted me to snoop a little more.
I started reading another seemingly short post, “Me, My Blog, and I,” and discovered he’d folded the quite long post behind a cut-line. So I went to the permalink page, and read the whole thing.
I learned a lot about him there. He’s 21. From a working-class background, but a scholarship-to-private-school education (interesting from a socio-economic angle to this also-working-class, but without scholarship guy). I went back to his Twitter page and followed him back. I also subscribed to his blog.
Because he’s wrestling more honestly with the dark side of learning and crafting via blogging and web-reading than most of the converts in our evangelosphere (and his writing skills and voice don’t hurt either).
I first heard about Slow Blogging (a la Barbara Ganley) when Alan Levine at CogDogBlog wrote a post identifying my “Portrait of the Teacher as a Good Young Racist” post as an example. (What’s the old joke about the person who learns the definition of “prose” and is thrilled to discover he’s been a “prose writer” all his life?) And it raises its seductive voice in this “Post-Punk Nerd’s” post yet again, in a way that challenges much of my thinking about classroom blogging, blogging in general, and books versus websites.
The irony? I wouldn’t have discovered this young writer had it not been for the very Tweeting and blogging he so powerfully questions. Have a nice dose of ambiguity on me.
Here’s the money quote, but again, the entire thing is worth a read:
When I was in third grade I read the complete works of Shakespeare. I found an old single volume hardcover copy in my parents’ basement with a faded brown dust jacket decorated with a watercolor of the Bard’s England, and I set my mind to read it. I knew that Shakespeare was supposed to be good, the best even, and I knew that I loved good writing, so it seemed the moral thing to do. I lugged the massive book to school each day, where it would sit on my desk when not in use, taking up a quarter of the surface area. My teacher would threaten all the usual grade school punishments if I didn’t start bringing a less obtrusive book from home, but I persevered. At the age of eight, I read the complete works of William Shakespeare.
I am not telling you this to brag or to show you how smart I was. To be completely honest, I didn’t understand ninety-five percent of what the poet was trying to say. I didn’t even understand what the characters were saying in the dialogue. I am telling you this because what is important is that I took the effort to read every single word that we’ve inherited from Shakespeare and when I didn’t understand something, I thought about it until I either understood it or I had a headache. I did not go to sparknotes.com and I did not skim. I did not turn to Wikipedia for a summary of the plot. I didn’t do any of those things because I couldn’t. I had no access to the internet whatsoever and even if I had, those resources probably weren’t available back in 1995.
And now, at age twenty one, when searching for the online article that accompanied that NPR broadcast, I find that I cannot even finish it before getting distracted and opening up a text editor to start writing this.
I am actually less skilled at reading and thinking now then I was at the age of eight. I may read more words per minute, but I am reading less carefully. I am learning less. I am retaining less. Worst of all, I am reflecting less.
Did you ever read somebody who reminded you of yourself when younger? This is about as close as I’ve come to that….
- Clarifications (?) on “Slow Blogging” and “Fast Reading”
- Blogging for Quality: Towards an Authentic Blogging Pedagogy
- “That’s not Homework; That’s Writing”: Authentic Student Blogging (Presentation Snippet 2)
- “Uninspired” Tom’s Laugh-Out-Loud End-of-School Year Post
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No. 1 — December 8th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Well, I rarely do read blogs that remind me of my younger self. I will say, though, that I’ve been doing the slow-blogging thing for some time and that compiles most of my G-Reader. Everyone from The Unapologetic Mexican and Slant Truth to yourself and Taylor the Teacher. That’s why people tell me they have tons of bloggers in their G-Reader and I’m not the least impressed, because it’s one thing to have quantity, but quality, and lots to read makes up for all of that.
This was a good post. Made me think that while we’re all in the rush to be superstar bloggers with our hundreds (and in some cases, thousands) of readers, our Diggs, Stumbles, Tweets, and the like, it’s easy to neglect the details of our stories and the intricacies of analysis. Well done by the young man, though I would call that less a quote and more an excerpt. It must have been THAT good.
Joses last blog post..My Own Purpose Driven Life
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 9th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Jose,
Ooh, I hope you read his post. It really was. His next one is great, too (about Christmas, Consumerism, and Culture in America).
I really should drop the emphasis on his age and just plainly state the guy’s a great writer. No patronizing possible.
I like what you have to say about the tensions between intrinsic and extrinsic reading and writing in this world. They’re undeniably there, and not always dis-honorable. In the past, writers wrote without feeling an obligation to read everything their readers wrote. This world changes that for me. I haven’t found a solution for that tension yet.
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No. 2 — December 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Thank heavens! Your tweet sent me to his blog, and after I read his post I went to look for your comment, and there was nothing there. That surprised me! I must learn patience.
Slow blogging is about all I have time for. I know that seems counter intuitive, but I find that to carve the time out of my day (four prepares, three kids, two dogs, one house) to write I have to really want to write about something. It has to stop me and take me away from all the other forces that push on my brain space. So tweets and plurks and the occasional status update on facebook aren’t an outlet for my thinking. My reacting, yes, but not sustained analysis.
When I read her writing, one of my students reminds me of my idealized self when I was younger – she self describes as a “peanut in a world full of cashews,” though I was nowhere nearly as brave as she is or as I wished to be as a young writer.
Kate Tabors last blog post..Putting all the pieces together
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No. 3 — December 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
@clay
Thanks for sharing. I’m relatively new to the blogging world and edublogosphere / PLN or whatever we call it. In the beginning I plugged so many blogs into my reader that it became more of a chore. Now I follow a dozen or so pretty closely. The ones I follow are the ones that seem to have a genuine love of teaching, sense of mission, and great respect for the process of learning. Great teachers like to share, borrow, and above all reflect on what they do.
Slow blogging. I like it. I’ll have to stop drinking coffee while I read blogs.
Charlie A. Roys last blog post..Recession Rescue for Schools
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 9th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Charlie, I’m fighting RSS and Google News glut again. I tamed it before the elections heated up, but am drowning again.
I think there are clearly parallels between this tool and drug addiction, that require an ability to limit intake at the very least.
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No. 4 — December 8th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
[...] academic writing can be online than in print form. (Which is an interesting counterpoint to the Slow Blogging post from earlier [...]
No. 5 — December 9th, 2008 at 4:57 am
[...] hoopla about slow-blogging has been good all in all. It has brought some fine posts, some funny ones, some angry ones. Mostly, it has made me restless in my own blogging. And so [...]
No. 6 — December 9th, 2008 at 10:56 am
[...] all comes from a post from Beyond School describing a 21-year old blogger who feels too caught up in, what I presume, he’d call fast [...]
No. 7 — December 12th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Thanks for linking to the manifesto and relating slow blogging to the problems of maintaining and focus. Another writer has written well on a close tangent at http://newlyancient.com/2008/12/09/slow-blogging, and is worth a read.
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No. 8 — December 22nd, 2008 at 1:08 am
[...] Must. Read: 21-year-old on Slow Blogging | Beyond School said: December 7, 2008 at 9:12 pm [...]
No. 9 — April 7th, 2009 at 6:31 am
[...] hoopla about slow-blogging has been good all in all. It has brought some fine posts, some funny ones, some angry ones. Mostly, it has made me restless in my own blogging. And so [...]