Tomorrow, I blog. About #onething
So yeah. This might not be much of a blog post. I mean, who really wants to read about about blogging tomorrow?
Tomorrow’s post might, repeat might, be far more interesting than this one. Lately I have been toying with lots of different ideas to blog about and fighting battles with the demons of procrastination. They are winning. Handily. I am also fretting about not having responded to comments on my last two blog posts. I usually like to try to respond to comments before moving on to the next thing but it doesn’t always happen that way and then it turns into a viscous cycle of procrastination and guilt. Forgive me for being overly dramatic.
Maybe I have been a victim of self-imposed inertia. But tomorrow I am going to blog. I am pretty sure about this but the actual writing might end up happening on Wednesday. I am going to blog about something that happens in class tomorrow. Of that I am sure. My friend Anne Hendler has created a blog challenge and I am going to participate. Historians might suggest this is related to the time she blogged about two things that happened one particular day but I will leave that to them. At the moment I am more concerned about what I will write tomorrow. There is a flurry of questions racing through my mind. A sampling:
- What will happen in class?
- How will the class as a whole go?
- Will it be different than usual Tuesday mornings? How? Why?
- What things will catch my eye as blogworthy?
- What types of things will be on my mind during class?
- Will my teaching be different?
- What moments will strike me as something to blog about?
- What moments will strike me as something to blog about but will get ignored? (Maybe for for various reasons like saving face or not wanting to write bad things about students.)
(How) Is this related to Sam Shepherd’s recent post about reputation and blogging and more? - Will it only be about moment or a slice? Or something alltogether different? Something bigger?
- Will I regret this post/proclamation come tomorrow morning?
- How is this decision to blog about tomorrow’s on thing impacting my current state of mind and awareness?
- How will it impact tomorrow’s class? How has it already impacted my planning for tomorrow?
- Why don’t I imagine I am going to blog every class?
- What learnings have I been missing out on by not imagining I’d write about one thing every class?
- Why don’t I imagine I’ll have an observer every class?
- Will there be negative aspects of this solemn oath to blog? Will I, for example, be more worried about collecting bloggable experiences than teaching and humans? Will I see students only as characters in my as yet unwritten post?
- (How) Is this whole process related to Steve Brown’s ideas about “preflection?” (Note to self: Watch Steve’s IATEFL presentation as soon as possible. Stop procrastinating on that too!)
- Why am I not planning right now?
I have no idea about most of these questions at the moment. Stay tuned. Until tomorrow. (Or Wednesday)
ELT Rants, Reviews, and Reflections 
Preflection as I have started using the term (with apologies to anyone who was already using it to mean something else), is about the thought processes you go through when preparing for an activity that will take place in the future. The activity I have had in mind has been the lesson itself. What you seem to have done in this post is to preflect about writing a different post. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
The questions you have asked yourself are crucial to the preflection process and, as you point out, some of them can’t be answered yet. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be asking them. In fact, maybe this is exactly why you SHOULD be asking them.
Anyway, I’m now really looking forward to tomorrow’s (or Wednesday’s) post. This pre-post post has given it added value. I’m not sure why but it has.
This is really terrible and silly to respond so long after the fact but here I am. Thanks for reading and sharing your idea of preflection. I think I wrote a long response about this was also a form of preflecting on the lesson too but now with hindsight i can see that it was more about the upcoming post. I think this added a change of perspective for the class as well as for the blog post that followed. I remember thinking during class that I should guarantee (if not publicly!) a blog post to come out of specific lessons more often. Of course that didn’t happen but I appreciated the super drive awareness on the day.
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.