A Serious Post #1 - Tumblr, Blogger and English Teaching

Being a teacher, one of the best things we felt so blissful to experience is to witness appreciation from our learners. About a month ago, I created another Facebook account just for my students since asking about it became an everyday routine. So I did and I received lots of friends requests from my dear students. Unintentionally, my Blogger and Tumblr blogs were known by some of them and days after days, I began to receive more and more followers, which of course are my students. 

Despite of the profanity of my writings and bad poetry, I've been receiving positive responses from them. In a way, other than classroom-based language teaching, I'm able to delve into the deeper and more authentic use of language that they use, rather than a language jotted down on papers in which it was bound by conscious restrictions and formality. Of course, with this advantage came another realization; kids these days are actually more exposed to profanity thanks to internet  and they discover both negative and positive influences faster than how we used to. 

Between these two extremes, what I can conclude is not necessarily negative, these kids are actually given the opportunities to witness reality and society, both its ugly defects and aesthetic aspects. They are growing up, developing their thoughts in a rate faster than we could imagine. The alarming threat here is the fact that through this rapid development, they have to attain some kind of measure to control that impulsive desire to discover, to know more. Remember, with computers we can undo a mistake, but in reality we can never 'unsee' what we have seen, we can never 'unknow' what we have known, we can never unimpregnate what we have impregnated.

Back to the original purpose of this post, Tumblr and Blogger helped me to connect with my students in a way that is beyond teacher-student communication. There is nothing more valuable than seeing these students write their posts with authenticity, with real emotions and feelings, with voluntary interests, without restrictions. However, this doesn't mean that their writings are error free and grammatical issues should be put away. But still, prior to focusing on language, wouldn't it be better if we can focus on meanings and motivate them to use the language more? Just saying.

That's all. Strangely this post feels familiar... Academic writing? My bloody AE, I'm so dead.