Many thanks to all the amazing people on the Teaching English – British Council Facebook page who voted for this post to win the April Blog of the Month award!

Voting, I should say means engaging with the piece in some way, which I think may mean people actually read it!  This was the piece on Cheating that I wrote after a conversation with my students revealed it was common practice amongst them.  The comments from people both on the Teaching English facebook page and on the blog post were quite revealing in terms of how prevalent it is across cultures, and on how common the reasons why students cheat are.  Definitely food for thought, and possibly another blog post in the future…

I’m also grateful for the award on a personal level.  I have not found it easy to blog in recent years, mostly because of time constraints.  If I’m honest, I sometimes feel guilty for blogging when there are a million other things that people are paying me to do being left undone, even though I am scrupulous about putting in the hours for the job – I have that niggling voice in the back of my head that goes “If he had time to blog, how come he didn’t have time to do XYZ?”  And also, more prosaically, coming home late in the evening to my family, feeling tired and in need of some down time – the inclination to sit down at the computer and think about teaching even more, just hasn’t been there.

That said, I am now trying to put a bit more time and effort into blogging, mostly because when I do write, I enjoy it; and because it is a part of my personal development and reflective practice.  Sometimes writing blog posts can be lonely – you see the statistics (however much we pretend they don’t matter, and they don’t, it doesn’t stop us checking) – but engagement and response to what you write can be patchy.  It can feel like howling into the wind.

So to see that something I wrote has had such an impact on people is tremendously heartwarming, and I thank you all!

I think that also makes it 7 Years, 4 months, and 22 days since the last time I won the award, not that I have been counting, which clearly means I will have to try harder not to leave it so long until next time!

Thanks again and take care all!

 

 

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