The power of blogs

This past week, I got some really terrible news. The FLES program (Foreign Language in Elementary School) has been cut from grades 1-3 and downgraded to once a week for 4th-5th grades (down from twice a week). I have been doing everything I can to advocate for the program this week. Basically, I've been living the Teacher Leadership class, the game we played the first week back, and the Wiki my group chose to do (on multilingual education). So far, I have a few people moved across the board, but not far enough yet ;). So, part of our Wiki is to write a position paper, right? I decided that I really needed to tackle that one since it is so close to my heart right now. One of my group members, Lori, posted a bunch of great resources in the References section of the Wiki. I decided to start my research there. The very first one on the list was this blog! I was literally tearing up while reading it. This is definitive proof that my program should not be cut. I ended up writing to the author and hearing back from him. He is a really nice teacher in Rhode Island (as you can tell from the title of the blog) who is having to fight for their secondary French program right now. His article was such a huge help with my paper and I also sent the link to the school board and posted it on our Facebook advocacy page. I have to admit, I never really saw blogs as something that I would appreciate as much as I am right now. I hope that I will have the opportunity to write something so profound that people will tear up while reading.