Accolades, Blogging & Coming to Terms......As Easy as ABC

In the good, old, early days of blogging, & the new Mummy Blogger phenomenon, when everyone was giving each other awards, being in the Tots 100 Index was the mark of Mummyblogger success & people were appearing in magazine articles, or being interviewed by a Mums' websites etc; bloggers would coyly put up a post (if they were British) or with a fanfare of trumpets (if they were just about anyone else) drawing attention to their particular success.

And why not? That's why bloggers love comments, it shows people read you & have engaged with your subject. It affirms & encourages you. It works the same with awards & so on. It makes you feel it was worth all the hard work.

I must confess I am not at all 'techy', (you mean, you noticed?.....) I am not very good at putting myself out there, 'increasing traffic', jumping through all the hoops, I keep reading that I need to, in order to get more followers, more traffic etc. I honestly don' t know how people manage to do it, & have a real life & a family & work too. The little I do do takes me long enough! So maybe I don't work hard enough at it. The writing comes more naturally, the 'putting myself out there' doesn't. And now it's all about monetising your blog, advertising, sponsored posts & making your blog 'count' or pay. And I feel all at sea again.

So I just bumble along. I keep writing because I love it, even though I wonder sometimes why I do it (& whether I will carry on once back in the 'normal' UK). I think I do it to make sense of the extraordinary 5 1/2 years I've spent abroad. And that's another reason why this blog will never be very popular in Mummy-blogger or Expat-blogger terms. I find I have to write about stuff which happens & is relatively normal here. But it doesn't always make for light hearted reading. it's also about a country people know little about, & probably care even less about.

I am not making excuses, I'm not complaining. It's just that something happened on Friday which made me feel like I was barking up the wrong tree & should just accept who I am & what I am good at! I always want to fit in & be good at whatever I try my hand at, but deep down I have always felt I don't fit neatly into any particular category in the blogging world & don't seem to have my finger on the zeitgeist pulse of what people want to read (oweeee, how's that for a jumbled metaphor) and it frustrates me, especially amongst so many who are so good & do it so effortlessly.

So what happened? Well on Friday the little nascent high school I teach at put on their play. It was called "The Jolly Roger". I don't teach drama at the school & had nothing to do with it. My IGCSE students kept asking if I was coming & how it wouldn't be the same without me there (which I thought rather strange) So I went along with 6 & 10 y-o in tow. I was handed a programme & inside was an insert from the cast which said this:





I blotted out my name, but it was addressed to me, honest! I only teach 14 students & 5 were in the play, who wrote the comments.

So that was why they wanted me to come along. I was so touched. I have never had an accolade like this in 20 years of teaching. Sure a few thank you cards, & certainly good reports every time an OFSTED inspector entered my classroom. I went easily through all the threshold assessments in teaching before I left (which means I'm probably too expensive to get a job in the UK when I return, should I want one); but this was compeletely unprompted, out of the blue & ovewhelming. In the interval people kept coming up to me & saying, 'Well done' & 'Wow you should frame that.' etc.

I think the problem is, I am my own worst enemy. I have always discounted teaching because of the, 'If you can you do, if you can't, you teach' aphorism, which irritates me intensely but nevetheless niggles away at me. So I have never valued myself as a teacher. I'm a teacher, so what, I think? I have always felt I needed to prove myself at something else professionally, to somehow validate the teaching choice - (i.e. "I could do something else, but I chose not to.")

But this, more than any OFSTED inspectors, for some reason, finally jolted me into accepting that I am a good teacher & that I should be proud. I think because it came from the students themselves. Ok, so my humour is appealing to teenagers & they regard my 'dry wit' as sarcasm, but not even that can take away from the fact that I am just chuffed to bits. I'm going to drop the old British reserve & give a little toot on my trumpet, saying I am a teacher, I'm darn good at it & I'm not going to apologise for it.

As for blogging; well I need to accept I'm just an amateur, dabbling in a hobby, who is, like my own students, trying to learn & improve as she goes along. So please bear with me.