The Last Post

Ummmm...hi there.

So you know how you'll resolve to floss your teeth every night and you'll get into a really good habit and stick with it for a while?

But then you go away for the weekend and even though you packed floss, you let yourself off the hook because, let's be serious, it takes an entire minute and a half to get through all your teeth. And when you're on vacation, that's a hassle. Plus it's only for the weekend...

Then you come home and you floss on Sunday night and Monday night but on Tuesday you stay up a little late watching Jon Stewart on hulu and you skip a night.

Suddenly a month has gone by and you can't remember the last time you flossed. And you go, "Huh. How did that happen? I was so good about flossing for so long."

*****

So I've been writing this blog for a while, almost two full school years. And every time my class did anything remotely related to cooking, I wrote a post. 

Then this spring happened. 

I'm not really sure what happened this spring except that one week went by, then another, and then another, and we didn't cook anything. I've caught some heat from my class about this, and the best explanation I could give was that we got busy doing other projects. That, and my vague ideas about the connection between cooking and Earth, Sun and Moon cycles never solidified. 

So no cooking, nothing to blog about. Next time around with the current science unit, I will make better efforts to keep the cooking thread going strong. I've got an idea about seasonal soup recipes and the crock pot our school just purchased.

Then there's this other issue about the blogging. I realized over the winter that I wouldn't keep posting to this blog after the end of the school year. Next fall my two-year curriculum will start over again and much of what we cook will be the same as or identical to the recipes I've already posted about. Writing about them again would be a bad version of Groundhog's Day.

So this is it. The last post. Time to reflect on what's gone on here.

1. One reason I started this blog was to record the process of integrating cooking into elementary curriculum. Next fall my old posts will be a valuable tool for avoiding the pitfalls from the first time I tried everything. I consider myself a reflective teacher, but so many times my reflections do not get recorded, or don't get stored in a place that I remember to look before I teach the lesson again. And one look at my plan book confirms that just because I keep all my old plan books doesn't mean they're going to be especially helpful two years later. At least in this case, I'll have a record, sometimes in excruciating detail, of what I thought about every recipe we cooked.

Exhibit A - My plan book at the end of the week

2. I had the experience of being a blogger. Now I know how to manage a blog, what it takes to keep one updated, how to insert links and all that jazz. It's a cool tool, and I'm sure that this knowledge will serve me in the future, both as a teacher and as a writer. (Unlike Twitter, which I have sworn never to get involved with. I have not tweeted. I do not tweet. I will not tweet. Conjugate away.)

3. I got to share my experience with a wider audience than myself. Early on, I came to the realization that one of my posts wasn't going to go viral and score me a book deal like a very few lucky people out there. What I have appreciated is the support and interest that friends, family members and co-workers have shown for both my cooking and my writing over the past year and a half. Thanks, people.

For a while I thought that I'd wrap up this blog and start the Liz Greenberg is a Writer blog. You know, to promote myself as a writer of fiction? But I'm not sure who my audience would be: kid writers, adults, agents and publishers. And frankly, there are more writers waiting to be published who have set up web pages than there are grains of sugar in a cup measure.

But the bigger issue in my decision to say good-bye to blogging for now is that I have too many other writing projects I want to work on and limited time to work on them. (If you're curious, the count is two unpublished middle grade manuscripts awaiting an agent/publisher and/or more revisions, a manuscript-in-progress, an adult focussed short story based on a crazy dream I had last month, and a contest I want to enter. And that's this week's list.) Suddenly, keeping a blog updated is about as appealing as continuing to date some guy I'm not that serious about when I'd rather be hanging out with my friends. 

So this is it, for now. 

The weird thing is that the blog is still going to be Here, and by Here I mean that nebulous thing called the internet. Kind of like space junk except less environmentally invasive.

So Future People (as in anyone reading this after June, 2013): Hi. Thanks for finding my blog. I hope you liked it. If you leave me a comment it would be kind of neat to know someone read my space junk. 

And to People-of-the-Now: Thanks for reading my ramblings and supporting my effort. Sometimes it's easier to keep doing crazy, possibly overly ambitious projects when you have a bunch of people telling you you're on the right track. I hope you have a summer filled with lots of healthy and yummy foods. Strawberry season is just around the corner...