The worst teachers stand in the front of a classroom or lecture hall and drone on from the time their classes begin until they end.
Communication in these classrooms is mostly one-way.
The teacher talks and talks and talks and talks. Students in the classroom listen or take notes. Or, speaking from personal experience, they sometimes sleep. This is what I did in high school for an entire semester of seventh-hour U.S. government.
And that brings me to this blog and the conversation it doesn’t ignite. So far, the dialogue has been generated mostly by me. That may not be a good thing.
Tuesday, on the other hand, was actually a better day. Of the 103 people who read the blog by Tuesday evening, five posted comments. I responded three times, raising the day’s total number of comments to eight.
Also, a total of 11 readers voted in a poll posted on the blog Tuesday.
Nancy Nall Derringer
This is something I’d like to change at Brome Hill. A blog I read nearly every day is written by Nancy Nall Derringer, a former newspaper columnist who lives in Michigan. Granted, she has been blogging for quite a bit longer than I have been. And she’s a better writer than I am to boot. But on a daily basis, Derringer and her readers have a great dialogue. They discuss. They debate. On days when she is busy, she simply opens a thread and turns them loose to carry the conversation on that particular day.
I see similar things going on at some of the WordPress blogs I have started to follow.
Wouldn’t it be great to have that kind of community here? Or maybe I’m the only one who thinks so.
It seems to me this blog could become a great place for people to chat. It’s read by quite a few Muscatine residents, along with a growing number of WordPress bloggers and many of the friends I’ve made going back to my grade-school days. Readers have come here via word of mouth, their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and via Google and other Internet search engines. The readers I know are as far-flung as Finland and Oregon. They are both politically conservative and liberal.
Just imagine what we could learn from one another if more of them joined me in what has been largely a one-way dialogue up to this point.
Speaking of Nancynall.com: There were a couple of links posted Tuesday on this blog that are worth your time. I often wonder how she finds this stuff.
The first link was a great commentary on Lance Armstrong. Nall Derringer called it the best column she has read about Armstrong in a good long time. For what it’s worth, I agree.
The second link is from the TV show, Myth Busters. It’s far more interesting than was the movie on which it was based.
