One thing that will be a little different about this blog, when compared to my old blogs, is that I'm going to be a little less anonymous of an author. In the past, I kind of went to lengths to conceal myself and my personal life from any audience who didn't already personally know me. However, over the course of four years of blogging, this wall, as it is wont to do, kind of eroded. In particular, readers got to know, eventually, where I lived, and with whom I was living, and what I did for a living (or, really, what I didn't do) and so on. On some level, I think, it's kind of pointless to strive to maintain this level of anonymity; and yet, on the other hand, it feels absolutely essential.
I have just started my second year of master's program at the University of Illinois, where I'm getting my teaching degree in special education. Before I started this program, I worked as an aide in a local middle school, working with students with cognitive and learning disabilities. Hopefully, if all goes to plan, I'll be working in a school again as a teacher in a little more than a year and, in the meantime, I have been in local schools as a practicum student. I have blogged about my students in the past, and I plan to blog about them again in the future. But these are students, who have their basic rights to privacy, especially students with disabilities, who have a legal right to privacy. So be sure, first of all, that whenever I'm talking about students, everyone will be pseudonymously named, and I will go to great lengths to protect their identities. Furthermore, I hope that I will never write about my students out of malice. Sure, sometimes kids do stupid stuff, and sometimes they do things that are hilarious, and sometimes they do things worth making fun of. But if I were ever to mock, deride, or humiliate my students - even anonymously - in any kind of public forum, well, then, I would seriously question why I wanted to be a teacher.
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