I'm chatting with a well-known, prolific (male) education blogger, whose work I greatly admire--and whose name I'm not going to reveal. I love what he writes, because it's deep--reaching past media flip-offs and who's winning the policy wars and whether they're Gates-funded. He writes about things like how children think, deconstructing the impact of competition on learning, and organic leadership that isn't laid out in seven steps by a Famous Author. We're talking about a mutual passion: how to get more teachers, beginning with bloggers, into rich professional conversation networks. He says:
How can we get the guy who works in urban schools, the guy who made his name on using tech tools in the classroom, the guy who teaches poor kids in a remote rural school, and the guy who teaches in the high-performing 'burbs to talk together?
There's a pause. That's a lot of guys, I say. Can girls play, too?
Immediately, he's self-conscious about the language that came without thinking. We talk about how the gende
