I just created two new blogs here, attached to this account. I hope to funnel some of my thinking there, and connect in interesting ways here. I've started to feel like this is a nice, public place to think and reflect on teaching/reading/writing, but that it's not an appropriate place for some of the things that I want to write about. So, I hope to post my thoughts on teaching, technology, literacy, etc. here, while my (perhaps less interesting) other thoughts will be posted in either of the other two blogs.
I'm a weird mix of research instincts (from being an English Ph.D. student some years ago) and the urge to write (from being a wannabe novelist/writer/provocateur since middle school), and these things are coalescing around some obscure interests, like common shade trees. Honestly, there's not a big difference between trees and Frank Lloyd Wright, really, except perhaps people are more interested in the latter.
So, anyway, that's what's up. I'm hoping to post a few things here soon, dealing with engagement and motivation, some new ideas for portfolios in my middle-school classroom, and some general thinking about literacy and technology. Big, teacher-related things.
So, thanks for reading.
I just posted a long discussion of Debbie Miller's book, READING WITH MEANING, on my other blog. Here's a link to the post if you'd like to read more. I created this other blog, as I stated before, to kind of develop my thinking as a teacher reading professional books and books related to teaching. So, I thought that would be the best place to post my thinking. 
I hope to have more to say about other books I'm reading soon, such as a book about classroom discussion that I started today - Building Literacy through Classroom Discussion by Mary Adler and Eija Rougle. I was planning to read a book about Socratic circles, but the book I have is rather dry and wordy - this one seems both more readable and more broadly applicable to contexts other than just a single instructional practice (Socratic circles seem like one approach, while this book - about discussion - seems to be about a larger family of approaches built around discussion. Much more useful.)
