Blogging: A Hot New After-School Activity – for Teachers
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Two years ago, a 26-year-old showed up for his first day as an English-as-a-second-language teacher at a high school in the Bronx. He had been warned plenty about how challenging his new job was going to be, but no number of summer orientation meetings could have prepared him fully for what lay in store.
The school’s lackluster graduation rates and pathetic test scores weren’t what left the greatest impression on him. He was stirred by the little things, the sticky Kool-Aid spills on the students’ desks and the sound of toilet flushing that unrelentingly shot through his basement classroom.
These are the kinds of details you’re going to see only if you’re a teacher who spends eight hours a day inside a school. Or if you’re reading the teacher’s blog.
Anyone who possesses the slightest curiosity about the sights and smells inside the city’s public school system can check out the Web site that the Bronx teacher, who blogs as Mr. Babylon, has maintained for the past year and a half. One post describes a class in which a bashful girl urinated on the classroom floor. Another recounts the time a male student learned Mr. Babylon’s annual salary and declared he’d like to become a drug dealer. Mr. Babylon is an outstanding writer, and even his most depressing dispatches are leavened with his keen ear for dialogue and his knack for capturing odd details.
Mr. Babylon is one of perhaps 15 New York City teachers who have made names for themselves in Cyberspace, posting dispatches from the classrooms on their blogs.
“I felt like it could make a difference,” Mr. Babylon said in a telephone interview. “People just push these problems under the rug and they pop out the other side. I saw a student of mine beat another kid over the head with a weapon in the crowded hallway, and I couldn’t stick around and help out. I had to go and teach my class.”
There are no hard numbers on how many teachers keep blogs, but Ed-Wonk, the teacher who runs Education Wonks, a California-based Web site that serves as a meeting point for teachers who blog, estimates at 75 the number of teacher bloggers with substantial reader followings.
The first popular New York teacher blog, Teacher: Year 1, was started in March 2002 by a former lawyer who joined the nonprofit initiative Teach For America. In the years since, the field has grown to include a bevy of bright young chroniclers, some of whom primarily address policy and teaching methods, while others get the school stuff out of the way quickly so they can delve into their personal lives.
The city’s Department of Education has no official policy concerning teacher blogs, but some teacher bloggers nevertheless expressed concern about the repercussions they may face and go to extremes not to reveal their schools or their own identities. In 2002, the blog of another Teach For America fellow, Allen Reece, was discovered by the principal at his middle school in Louisiana. The principal was so furious with Mr. Reece for posting critical comments about the school that the young teacher had to shut down Apple A Day. (The Apple A Day blog that is now up and running deals with Apple Computer products.)
The reasons teacher bloggers gave for maintaining their sites are manifold. Some are driven by agendas and hope their anecdotes can help bring on policy changes or at least make the public more aware of what’s really happening inside the city’s schools – including one where dozens of laptop computers were apparently stolen this summer. Others said they post on their sites because the idea of blogging appealed to them and they thought their jobs would provide them with colorful material.
One of New York’s more established bloggers, Ms. Frizzle, a science teacher in her late 20s, started by writing a blog that had nothing to do with teaching.
She posted entries about films and Fringe Festival plays she had seen, but she felt her blog was aimless and less than riveting. It wasn’t until she began writing about her workdays that her blog became a highly readable travelogue of an inner-city school. “Everyone has an opinion about the state of education and the schools, but how many people had ever been in one after finishing their own education?” she wrote in an e-mail message.
When Nancy Brodsky, who teaches English in the South Bronx, started her blog, Up the Down Staircase, it was mainly a place to vent, but she said it has evolved into a space where she can reflect on the craft of teaching. Through her blog, Ms. Brodsky, 26, has met other teachers across the country, one of whom she went to visit in San Diego last spring to see how a school on the opposite coast deals with similar problems.
Mildly Melancholy, a teacher living in Queens, includes pictures on her chatty site. There’s a snapshot of her back-to-school to-do list, as well as her baby pictures. “Let’s take a look at how freaking adorable I used to be,” she wrote. “I mean seriously. Is this not the cutest little baby you have ever seen?”
“It’s wonderful that you can see what these people are going through,” a Santa Fe-based education writer whose Web site links to teachers’ blogs across the country, Joanne Jacobs, said. “These bloggers don’t write in teacherese, so it’s a great way for people who aren’t in the classroom to look at what’s going on inside.”
Ms. Frizzle sees her readers as her friends. She writes primarily about the goings-on in her school – one science teaching position is still vacant; her bulletin boards are orange this year – but she also opens up in personal ways, letting people know she bought a new Western-style shirt and she’s considering switching to decaf at night.
Mr. Babylon’s postings rely on slangy dialogue and wisecracking physical descriptions. They read like stories in the New Yorker debut fiction issue. He keeps his lens trained on what happens inside the classroom. “I try to keep it focused on school and not on what I had for dinner,” he said.
“Teaching can be an alienating profession,” another fan of the blogs, Jenna Fournel, said. She works for the Center for Inspired Teaching, a nonprofit organization that provides teacher training in Washington, D.C.
“With blogs, they can network and share ideas,” Ms. Fournel said.
A network of teachers following the developments on one another’s blogs is hardly something to quarrel with, but things become more complicated when the audience expands to include fellow faculty members, parents, and students.
Most of the teacher bloggers who corresponded with The New York Sun said chances of parents’ or students’ finding their sites were nil, but the teacher who runs Ahora Vamos A Contar wrote in an e-mail: “Pretty recently, a fellow blogger and I discovered through a tracking service that someone in our district was reading our blogs. The same service showed that someone in the Department of Education in D.C. was also reading them. Kind of freaks us out. We’ve heard a lot of horror stories about people who lose their jobs over this stuff, not to mention issues with student confidentiality.”
Asked if she’s ever hesitant about including certain observations in her blog, Ms. Frizzle responded: “Quite often. … The schools in New York City are very political places.”
Ms. Brodsky, of Up the Down Staircase, is so worried about including potentially explosive material that in addition to considering carefully what to include, she declines to make her archives available.
Being discovered by people they know isn’t the only worry of the bloggers. Some of the more than 12 million Americans who keep blogs are high school students. “Ethical Decisions of the 21st C. School Teacher Lady,” a recent entry on Hip Teacher’s blog, tells of the day Hip Teacher was home nursing the flu and stumbled across one of her students’ blogs.
Her response: She posted “DON’T EVER READ YOUR STUDENTS’ PERSONAL BLOGS” on her site, but only after learning that “Angry Boy talks about blowing somebody’s brains out” and Stoner comes to school most days with water bottles filled with vodka.