The walls come tumbling down

(Flickr image courtesy of Courosa)

My mind is elsewhere these days. Any readers of my blog (formerly blogs) have certainly noticed a slowdown, and may be wondering if it will all come to a screeching halt soon. I used to write three blogs: one is on hold indefinitely, another has been put to pasture for good, and this one is, well, limping along.

If I used to comment on your blogs, well, that isn't happening so much anymore either. Yet I'm online at least as much as I used to be -- it's just that my Internet time is increasingly being spent on activities related to teaching.

Teaching. That's what I've always done for a living, by the way. And it's something that has been carefully kept out of my blogging life. You have only to look at my Blogger profile: "I've been living, working, cooking and raising a family in France for 19 years."

I've covered the "living" part on this blog for nearly 4 years, with a little bit about my family thrown in now and then. I covered the cooking part for almost as long on Cuisine Quotidienne.

But working? I made the conscious decision to keep that out of blogging.

I think that is going to change soon. (Fear not -- if I start a teaching blog, it will be on a different site!)

Of course I would never write one of those "this is what's going on at my job" blogs, the type that gets one fired. But since getting involved in Twitter, I have plunged into the world of teaching philosophy, methods for teaching English as a foreign language, and have discovered fabulous websites and blogs by teachers who are not counting their work hours.

I want to be part of all that -- again. I realize that while teaching here in France, I have built very French-style walls around my work life and home life. And it's been for the best of all possible causes: being available for my daughters. But they are increasingly doing their own thing, and with that void, my passion for teaching has returned big-time.

It was never really lost, it was just left at work when I went out the door in the evening.

Now it's with me all the time, the way it used to be in my pre-family days when I was teaching in an American high school.

My mind is elsewere these days -- and it feels great.