English teachers, as a group, tend to be fearful of technology. There's something absurd and noisome in the frantic pace and noxious colors of most television programs, and the computer with its endless, compact storage capability seems the most likely threat to the beloved book since microfiche. One of my fellow English teachers is technophobe enough to have fled the room when an office computer began "getting smart" with her. We prefer the smell of vellum and binding glue to the burning tang of silicon chips. So it came as something of a surprise to my former-English teacher mother when I told her I would be working with a Blog in my junior English class. Her response revealed a deep misunderstanding: "What, that green guy?"

Since my start five years ago, Wheeler had been gently prodding all departments to become friendlier with the developing technologies appropriate to each discipline. There were in-service days, faculty meetings, memos, even the occasional flyer about the evanescent pleasure of the PDA (not the kind by the lockers), the notebook computer, the laser pointer, the Malaysian Mind Eraser... well, ok, none of those, but there were plenty of little hints that technology would make our teaching fresher, our lives fuller. It was clear that our students were fast out-pacing us in all aspects of the technological world - soon they would have robots that we could never hope to control. It only made sense to dip at least a toe into the waters of Lethe, or CompUsa.

Thus, the Blog, the ominous sounding contraction for the Web Log. I had first encountered the Blog last summer when I happened upon the personal Blog of Ben Harris, former Wheeler sixth grade teacher, and now Intel employee developing educational technologies friendly to the teacher. He was creating lessons with Palm Pilots in the science classroom and testing all manner of new computer programs to see what application they might have in the education world. Ben's Blog was a sort of online journal, full of big and little thoughts about books he was reading, boats he was building, and triathlons he was racing. The site was visually interesting, with pictures of wooden boats and still photographs taken on a digital camera. New entries to the Blog journal would move to the top of the webpage as they were added, each with a space saved for contributions from the cyberworld at large; anyone who happened upon Ben's space could comment upon what she read.

In addition to all that was boiling away on Ben's site, he had a set of web links to educational Blogs of interest simmering at the bottom of the site. Classes around the country, kindergarten through university, were using the web journal format as way of publishing student writing; the cyber-classroom was forcing students to be public intellectuals.I was excited by what I saw - especially by the online discussions of literature happening via the medium of the Blog. From Kansas to Cambridge, students were taking in-class discussions onto the public forum of the web, and with rich results. I wanted one. I had ideas, the hatchings of plan, the germ of creativity so rarely seen growing in my technologically arid classroom.

So gentle reader, you may now feel free to imagine that I sat myself down before a grand computer and poked through the computer code, or HTML, required to lasso text and pictures from the ether and get them onto the Internet. It was a grand project, but through struggle and toil my efforts paid off. That is, of course, your imagination speaking. I did nothing of the sort, but you can feel free to believe what you like. What I did do is get on the phone to Portland, Oregon, and call Ben Harris. The truth be told, there is no Blog without my co-conspirator, my technological guru, Mr. Harris. He set up all the code to make a user-friendly template that I could then use at my leisure to start blogging with my juniors. I just had to brainstorm some ideas for how to implement the weblog, and then use the flexibility of the import system to bring my pedagogy to the screen.

"American Literature and its Discontents." It was instantly a Blog for the ages, with a name stolen directly from a Yale professor's syllabus (thanks to Bryan Wolf). I would dazzle the students with my technology. Now, it was just the problem of the blank page, the tabula rasa of Netscape. I had bothered to think about technology for several hours, and it might as easily be left to the wayside before I had even begun. So I started at the beginning: Huckleberry Finn.

Juniors read Huck Finn for their summer reading, and we started our year with a consideration of Twain's contemporary controversy, the depiction of Jim, Huck's slave companion. We watched a PBS documentary on the still piqued argument about Twain's use of the N - word in reference to Jim. A school in Missouri, Twain's home state, was mired in angry debate over the teaching of Finn and whether acceptance of the book implied acceptance of the stereotypes and derogatory language used to describe Jim. The conversation in our class was a quiet one. It was difficult for many of the students to take a stand when the implicit understanding was that Wheeler supported the teaching of Finn as "great" American literature. After all, we assigned it for summer reading. I knew many empathized with the mother and daughter responsible for bringing the suit against the Missouri schools, but few spoke up in support of such an argument.

So here was the first use of the Blog. Take a controversial subject and see what students will say when they write about it, and have to respond to each other's writings. That's the beauty of the Blog: it is, by its very nature, a responsive medium. Every entry has a comment button at the bottom, so the invitation to conversation is explicit. The assignment required not only that students write thoughtfully about a literary debate, but also that they respond to two of their peers' entries. The resulting pieces were much more insightful than anything we had broached in class, and the passion in the writing bled over into the discussions the following day in class. Another wonderful result was that everyone had a voice in this discussion. Even the quietest student could respond on the Blog without the tensions and anxieties so often associated with being outspoken in class.

It became part of the class' weekly functions to respond to a Blog prompt on Friday. Sometimes the prompts came directly from me; and at other times, the students would come upon a really important question in their class discussions, and that would become the Blog for the week. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) example for my juniors was "The Simple Life" Blog.

We had just finished The Great Gatsby, and I was looking for a way to bring some serious sense of the current to our thoughts on the end of Gatsby; Jay Gatsby is dead, Nick and Daisy are incomprehensibly still together, the whole thing is a giant mess that seems endemic to a bohemian 1920's lifestyle more than anything. For me, Gatsby was more contemporary than anything else we read that semester - there was something eerily current about the excesses portrayed in Fitzgerald's masterpiece, and I wanted to make that clear. We are living in a Gatsby-esque age, complete with massive gaps between the wealthy and the poor, an evaporating middle class, and the phenomenon of increasingly larger and more irresponsible luxury vehicles. It's an eerie premonition of an automotive dystopia that a "death car" kills Myrtle Wilson. Yes, this is Gatsby country all right. We even have the brutish Nick for our president. Again.

That same week, in a conversation about the contemporary Gatsby, the class started talking about a new reality TV show called "The Simple Life." It apparently stars two wealthy heiresses who, finding themselves without anything to do other than shop, agree to go live on a farm in Arkansas and participate in the simple life with a local family there. It sounded prurient and foul, and wonderfully Gatsby. On their own, the class decided that this was to be the next Blog: we would watch "The Simple Life" (lord help us) and respond to it as a kind of Gatsby Redux, with Paris Hilton's voice "sounding like money."

The show was wrong on many fronts: it was exploitive, classist, demeaning to women (even obscenely rich ones), and without value as a TV program. But as an artifact, as a marker of something very current, and very Gatsby, it was marvelous. Even the commercials drew rather direct lines to the culture of Nick and Daisy out there on East Egg. And like the passing flaneurs who stare into the glowing windows of Gatsby's gilded house, it was captivating. The students' responses were even more so. Kathryn Maguire responded with the following (excerpted):

Fitzgerald describes his characters as privileged beyond their own recognition, and endlessly vapid. They appear surreal, like Hilton and Ricci [sic] on their farm journey. They are not used to their surroundings, to the minimum wage, to the people who work difficult jobs for a living, and especially to the town's morals and ideals.

Here is Samantha Cohen:

There is no sense of the death of reality with our two blond socialites. They live, breath, and are the eggshell. They are completely created by money, just as Daisy's voice was made of it, these girls are nothing more then the money which they will inherit... Who are we in this world of want and the wanted? Perhaps we too are childlike bystanders to a world completely alien.

There were so many apt and powerful responses, I would be writing forever to give you a taste of the class' excellence in writing on a difficult and necessarily introspective question. And that is the beauty of this technology - it is a publishing house of sorts, they are published authors at sixteen, and it makes writing serious. I do not believe that the quality and depth of responses I received on the Blog would have been possible in any in-class writing assignment or Socratic Seminar. It was distinctly because of the public nature of this kind of writing--writing for peers, and for the larger Internet public--that such luminous thinking was possible.

We carried the conversation immediately to the book Reading Lolita in Tehran that deals with the power of teaching Gatsby in Iran before and during the revolution. The class discussions wavered between pop-culture and contemporary literary responses to Gatsby. We carried on our technology experiment with Dickinson, Emerson, Douglass, Hemingway, Whitman, and others. While there were many missteps in the process of writing prompts and evaluating students' writing, the quality of the successes so overwhelmed those failures that the Blog became inseparable from what I did as a junior English teacher. Perhaps the most memorable piece of the Blog work for me was working with Marshall Gilson to record students reading Emily Dickinson tribute poems onto the Blog site. For the few weeks that the audio existed on the web, I would take all of my friends to the site just to hear the clear voices of my students speaking to me across the cyber-universe. Hearing students' poetry in their own voices - the wandering Internet searcher couldn't hope to find something more real, more American.

I cannot say that my experience with a vibrant and active Blog has made me more likely to roll the LCD projector on its burdensome cart up the two flights of stairs to my classroom, but I have found I am less likely to tune out the History teacher who raves about her "Smart Board", or the math teacher waving his laser pen in my direction. You never know when I might want to point at something with a directed beam of light, so I listen, attuned to the gleam of possibility in the new fangled gadgets my colleagues drag into faculty meeting. Most days I still can't figure out how to record on my VCR while watching a different channel, but I am still using the Blog along with my beautifully tired copy of Gatsby.

Christopher Holmes (ChrisHolmes@wheelerschool.org) teaches English at The Wheeler School in Providence, RI.

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