Learning Strategies

A reader of both this blog and Adam Gaffin’s Universal Hub asked why I’ve turned off comments in my blog. Naturally he had to ask the question on Universal Hub. I replied as follows:

I have comments turned off because they tend to generate flame wars and spam. Adam’s blog is meant for general discussion, but as a public-school teacher I can’t be in that position. You can imagine what would happen if somebody posted something inappropriate and it appeared on my blog (even though I wasn’t the author of the comment). No schoolteacher can allow his or her blog to become a public forum.

Coincidentally, I received an interesting rant by email in response to my post from yesterday concerning Huckabee’s so-called Fair Tax. My point had simply been that I wanted to illustrate one of the widespread errors that adults make in applying middle-school math, but it engendered a long rant from one of Mike Gravel’s campaign directors. [How weird is that? Politics makes strange bedfellows, including the two Mikes.] He had a point, at least a political and economic point, but it had little to do with the math, which, as he himself pointed out, he apparently understood. My point was simply that an n% tax is a standard concept from a mathematical standpoint, even if there might be motivation for redefining it for political reasons. While this writer’s rant wouldn’t have been unacceptable on the “public school teacher” grounds that I cited above, I still can’t open my blog to unmoderated comments, and I don’t have time to moderate.

Labels: teaching and learning, technology