As we encourage teachers to communicate more with the wider public, we need to be up front that it might involve enduring some uncivil blog response — we may sometimes get some cranky comments on what we have to say. This came up because Peter Smagorinsky sent us a lovely portrait of a great teacher that he wrote for the Atlanta Journal Constitution and we were about to link to it when we spotted some the rather rude comments at the bottom and held back sharing it. Peter pointed out that this just “comes with the turf,” so here’s the link.

Our take on this is that like Smagorinsky we mustn’t let a bit of rough-and-tumble silence us. Perhaps that’s part of the hesitation that many teachers feel — but what we have to say is too important.

Ironic, though, that the teacher’s middle name is “Polite”!