Why I really want to go to China.

The main reason I’m going to China is because I want to get out of here. I need to get out of here. Here being the United States. I teach World History so I need to see the world. I don’t believe I can truly impart meaningful knowledge or offer significantly diverse perspectives without experiences like the one I’m about to have in China. The Fulbright GPA I’m participating in is focused on this idea of inter-cultural interactions shaping how we teach afterwards.

But everything I just said feels obvious to me. This desire to go abroad and have unique experiences has been gestating in my soul for the last two years. That’s why I thought I should whip up a list of other reasons why I want to go to China.

I want to be Batman when I grow up.

I’ve been struggling for quite some time to get inspired and update this blog. Granted, it has only been six months so I don’t think anyone can really be too upset with me for failing on such an epic scale. But I just didn’t feel like I could live up to my original goals. I never felt that I had anything to add when there are already so many great blogs run by thoughtful educators.

I really wanted to start writing again because I’m going to China in less than a week and this will be the best way for me to record my travels and to communicate with the folks at home that I haven’t been shot in the head for crimes against crimes against humanity. But even then, the idea of writing an “I’m going to China in one week” post didn’t sit right with me either.

There must be a way of going about this that can make me passionate about writing again. Once upon a time, I kept a blog where I used fake names for my friends - because the Internet was dangerous before lolcats - and whined about how hard it was to be male, middle class, and white. So I’ll do something honest instead of pretending I’m going to be the next big thing in the teacher blogosphere or writing cookie cutter posts.

And if I’m really being honest then I have to ask myself, “What would Batman do?”

New Year's resolutions.

I usually try to avoid setting goals for the new year because it seems pretty silly. If I'm not doing something to improve myself already then why should the start of a new year be any different? To me, the new year usually just marks the beginning of another nine-month period in which I'll mislabel the date on everything I do.

But this new year is actually different because I have started a new stage in my life. In the past week, I've been reflecting on what has happened during the past few months of my burgeoning career as a teacher. Now I know that I just used a synonym for "flourishing" to describe my trajectory but that doesn't mean I'm happy with where I am as an educator.