So obviously I’m trying to blog on here again, and Jen asked me about it the other day. “What do your students think?”

“Oh, they don’t know about it,” I said. “I haven’t told them.”

So here I am, blogging to no one, at least for another few days until I tell people about it. This is not that different, I think, from the student experience. On the one hand, your teacher assigned you this blog. On the other hand, you’re not sure if he’s reading it. Until it is commented upon, in some way or other, the blog post is both read and unread.

I can’t tell whether this is a benefit or a detriment to students. For some, the idea that actual people will read their blogs is cause for alarm; for others, the idea that nobody will read it is deeply demotivating. Some, I imagine, both hate the idea of readers for fear of what they might think, and also think of it as busy work if nobody reads it. I started this assignment for AP Language with the belief that the best imagined reader for most of us is (1) a like-minded someone who will understand us the way we want to be understood, and (2) probably not our English teacher. (I had a lot to say about it.)

And yet I am finding a lot of freedom here in the liminal space between having readers (you, reader, are imagined as my AP Language students) for whom I am writing, who give me purpose to start a new blog post, and knowing that no one is reading yet (which perhaps frees me from worrying about the judgment of others). There’s obviously no correct answer here, but I hope that you find some motivation in the idea that people may actually read what you have to say.

Oh, yeah, one more thing: All the blogs go live at the beginning of second trimester.