I've been reading
Sharon Jumper's diary with excitement this afternoon. I surfed over to a few of the Iraqi blogs and got a feel for what's coming out of the barrios of Baghdad.
I've got this really awful habit of starting 50 different projects at once and not being able to finish anything I really need to get done, but I was struck with such a killer brainstorm I had to share it.
An open line of communication between the citizen-journalists of Iraq and the bloggers of the US is an incredible teaching tool. As a former teacher, I almost wish I was back in the classroom so I could set up an online blog pen-pal program between my students and kids in Iraq.
I left a comment on the Iraq Blog Count web site regarding this, and I'm hoping that something good will come of it. I will gladly volunteer to set up a blog and recruit a few teachers to assist in creating a schedule and curriculum.
Last year, one of my students was talking about flying, and made an offhand comment about "...those crazy I-raqis flying planes into buildings." I shouldn't have been nearly as shocked as I was, knowing the state of our media. I think I did a decent job in correcting him in a way that didn't make him feel stupid, and so that he'd conveniently forget the lesson he learned within hours. Millions of adults in this country were stupid enough to vote for Bush twice. But there is simply no excuse for us to allow our kids to lump all those kids on the other side of the world into one category of "terrorists." If we want to avoid war in the future, we must start treating the world as a classroom rather than a Uranium dumping ground.
I've never lost the desire or love for teaching, and I would be enthralled to have a classroom of Creative Writing students engaging in meaningful conversations with Iraqi children. I still love that feeling of opening kids up to new worlds and helping them understand that what they see on television is sometimes not close to reality. Thank you, Mrs. Burns, for spending a month on propaganda study back in 8th grade!
If anyone is aware of a program like this that already exists, please let me know and I will refer teachers and students to it. Otherwise, I will gladly volunteer to set up the blog myself and see what kind of sister-school program we can start.
I invited the IBC folks to comment at my personal web site, but Kossacks, I'll be watching the comments and hoping something really wonderful comes of this.