Two (teacher?) blogs keep an eye on Plainfield schools

Understanding Plainfield's school situation takes all the help one can find, and there are two blogs (by teachers?) that should be on the check-out list of those who want to understand what's going on with the institution whose fiscal bite dwarfs the Plainfield taxpayer's usual pet peeve, city government.

Plainfielders are ever in the debt of Maria Pellum who, despite classes of her own, still finds time to weigh in on issues of deep concern to the community about the schools (as well as matters at Evergreen School, her particular corner of Plainfield's educational universe).

But it certainly helps to find that there are folks at work within the school district who are trying to assess what is going on, where good things are happening and where they are not, what games are being played and what is at stake.

For these kinds of insight, you will want to check out these two blogs --

• Dr. e = mc² (see here)
  
  
• An eye on Plainfield schools (see here)

I believe they are done by two teachers, perhaps at PHS. You may find some of the discussion a little oblique (as contrasted to Maria or myself), but you can understand that there are reasons.

Among those reasons can be that the politics of being a district employee can be just as volatile and dangerous as anywhere else in the real world, and the typical rewards-and-punishments mindset has plenty of room for play in hierarchical, command-and-control organizations like school districts.

I hope you will check them out, and give the authors feedback through your comments to encourage them.

A NOTE TO THE SCHOOL BLOGGERS: If you want to make it a bit easier for folks to find your posts, there are two simple things that can be done. Since many folks find Plainfield-related items by Googling 'plainfield' plus with or without other search terms, it definitely helps to --

1) find a way to use the word 'Plainfield' somewhere in your blog description (Blogger allows a tag line called 'blog description' -- as in my 'where Plainfield turns for news' -- and other blog platforms have options for such descriptive lines that can be either shown or hidden). These help Google's search bots to find and tag you as they crawl the Web; and

2) find a way to work the word 'Plainfield' into the opening 15 words of each post. It may sound limiting, but it also helps Google to find and tag stuff for searchers interested in the topic 'Plainfield'. I hate it sometimes, because I have clever opening lines that this tactic just kills, but then I ask myself which is more important -- folks finding the posts, or me getting off a good line.

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• Plainfield schools blog: "Dr. e = mc²"
• Plainfield schools blog: "An eye on Plainfield schools"
  

-- Dan Damon [follow]

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