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Why blog

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well, why I blog[3]

You may change somebody’s life.

Maths and I will never be parted again. I stumbled into the OU via an odd route; I started maths due to a single conversation with a fellow student. He changed my life, I’ll forever be thankful to Paul.

This seems like a staggering responsibility—it isn’t. If we strive to tell it like it is and behave in a proper manner we [us bloggers] are doing our jobs. We came to the OU to make ourselves better, it will, but often in a way that we hadn’t foreseen—we may make someone else’s life richer too.

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neil

Why Blog

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Edited by Neil Anderson, Thursday, 7 Jul 2011, 11:54

well, why I blog[2]

My school has an embedded police-person, he said to me once, “my first partner told me to slow down…if you are walking too fast you aren’t watching”. Life is like that—it’s easy to let it go past without enjoying it.

Every morning and evening I walk along the canal, dodging the joggers and cyclists who don’t see what I see—the wild-flowers, the bees, the kingfisher, the perch, the big pike, the day spring arrives, the day autumn comes…they are going too fast. That’s [partly] what blogging is—looking, properly, at your life and remembering it for future reference.

Let’s take my M208 as an example: reading my posts back I see a pattern—a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with myself. Why? Aye, there’s the rub—there’s the looking and then there’s understanding. If you don’t read your own stuff back and reflect then you’ve missed half the point—blogging gives you a platform to make you better. So…

Partly, I think, that it’s down to my lack of technique, I’m a great fan of technique. [I can do some of the working, but it doesn’t come naturally.] So far, with maths, I’ve been reliant on the technique that I learnt at school, where I understood nothing. Now I’m grasping at the understanding without having developed the technique. I feel unsafe.

Developing technique takes time and effort, I haven’t made the time or the effort; I think that I need to. I could just ignore this and still pass, but that’s what I’ve been doing—‘working’ the course rather that working at it. I’m doing this [OU stuff] for me, if I fail nothing will change except my conception of me.

That’s a reason to blog—I might have come to this realization of what was wrong without it, but I suspect that I wouldn’t have. It’s easier to be honest when the person you are trying to lie to is your own words.

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neil

Why Blog

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Edited by Neil Anderson, Wednesday, 6 Jul 2011, 20:41

well, why I blog[1]

I’ve been trying, and failing, to do some M208 work over the last few of days. No work has happened—I’m too busy at work-work, too knackered-tired and too mentally-unfocused to do more than stare hopelessly at the unit texts. Bad news? Not really—I’ve been here before, many, many times. How do I know this? Because I blog and I can read what I thought then….

Blogging, for me, is akin to keeping a public diary, a diary helps when you hit the lows [or highs]—it’s a comfort to know that you have been in a similar place before. Gives you hope [or pause], and gives you a direct-tunnel into remembering the feelings that you had then. Your own writing is a form of smell/taste—you’re right back there.

Why is it important that it is public?

Because if you’re, potentially, going to splatter your thoughts across the entire ether you think a bit. And when you think, you think about what it is that you are really thinking. True, I sometimes craft a post in an attempt to make it a bit more interesting, or to reinforce a point, but in general what you read here is me. I do this for you, If I was doing this for myself it would be a stream of incoherent babble, I’ve got books and books of that.

The most important person that you’ll ever analyse is yourself. When you do there are obvious temptations to lie; if you analyse yourself in public these temptations are fewer. Why? Because in a certain sense you have to step outside yourself—you create a caricature of yourself [an avatar?] that splits you off from yourself. Despite yourself you’re tempted into relating, mostly, the truth.

I started off trying to say something entirely different here—how my M208 blog had helped me realize where I was going wrong—as you can see I didn’t, which is why I’ve labelled it [1].

Blogging, like forgiving, is for you. The very act of trying to write what it is that you feel/think is important. There are some spin-offs, we’ll talk about those next time…

Permalink 12 comments (latest comment by Nigel Timothy, Thursday, 7 Jul 2011, 02:33)
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neil

number

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There's a number at the bottom of my blog that I try my hardest to ignore, but don't.

I'm getting close to the point where I forever have to ignore it, or do something that I pretend that I don't like—mention it.

It's times like these that I fully realize what a rotten, rotten human being I am, and what I'm here for.

You all know what's going to happen, don't you?

Permalink 4 comments (latest comment by Neil Anderson, Saturday, 4 Jun 2011, 19:46)
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