Blame It On The Kids

I am ready to hurl my newly-repaired computer at the wall, because I've spent the last hour and a half needlessly messing with my blog's design.  Stupid!  And I'm going to blame it all on my students!  That's right - you heard me. If only we had all kept things SIMPLE like I had planned.

SIMPLE.

Kids ruin everything.
Back in March when I started this blogging thing, I was hoping to learn enough to teach my 7th grade students how to do it. I figured, what better way to allow them to really invest in their own independent reading and writing lives than to open up the entire world of cyberspace to them and to help them learn some cool way of communication?

Besides, everyone knows that anyone who can string a sentence together should have her own blog, right?

So we started the unit a couple of weeks ago, and my students have already left me in the blogging dust.  They have been routinely pushing my rinky-dink help aside and going for a lot more advanced technical feats than I had planned for or that I understand.  Problem is, we were supposed to keep it SIMPLE.  SIMPLE was going to allow me to believe I had some semblance of control. SIMPLE was going to allow me to spend all of June just patting myself on the back and offering the correct spelling of my name for the TV stations and my Teacher of the Universe golden apple. I was going to get the credit for teaching something, by God!

Well, once again, the teacher has become the student.  It is a humbling and inspiring lesson.

And this leads me down the blog design rabbit hole.  Today, I thought I'd add a fancy gadget so I could be like all the other cool kids, but my SIMPLE template wouldn't let me; I had to upgrade to something fancy and complicated.  Little did I realize that changing the template would wipe out all of my previous design elements.  Now I know, you're probably thinking What design elements? and that is EXACTLY my point.  My design was soooooo spot on, that you didn't even recognize its brilliance.  I had to go and mess with SIMPLE brilliance because of those darn kids.

Mine

Theirs

By the way, after all that mess, I'm back to my SIMPLE template... but I'm trying something new.

If you'd like to leave a comment for those darn kids below, I'll be sure to read it to them in class.  I can't guarantee they'll hear me though - they're very busy being awesome - and it's not my fault at all.