The Merits of the Case

Not that I’ve been watching the vote count or anything, but my vote totals have been skyrocketing today. That’s what happens when all the famous people start blogging about you. And it’s not only them, of course. It’s all of you. I have no words to tell you how stunned I am at how all of this has played out over the past couple of weeks. I am humbled by your support and willingness to help, and I can’t quite believe how many people all over the entire world have voted for me. More on that soon. For now, I want to tell you about a few of the amazing things that have been happening this week.

Last night I was checking my site stats to see who was visiting and from where, and I noticed hundreds of hits coming from this website and from this YouTube video. Curious, I visited the site and watched the video, only to hear my name mentioned by someone I had never seen or heard of before in my life. It was a little eerie and so I e-mailed him to thank him and to try to find out the connection. As it turns out, it wasn’t so mysterious—John is a good friend of a friend of mine from school. So I guess I am officially a nerdfighter now. And proud of it, I might add.

I keep thinking that this whole word-of-mouth vote-getting that has been going on is a little like six degrees of separation. With so many people getting in on all the fun, it seems like eventually someone is going to get the e-mail from more than one friend or from friends from two different circles or something like that. This evening my sister called me to tell me that she has been telling her friends and co-workers and some of her customers about the blogging scholarship. Molly said that today she told one of her customers about what was going on and the customer said that she had already voted for me this morning…but had no idea that I was Molly’s sister. She said she was reading the blog of one of her favorite authors, Jen Lancaster, and came across Jen’s plea for votes for me. So she followed the link and voted, having no idea that the person she was voting for had any relation to anyone else that she knew. Talk about a small world!

I also discovered that there is an English teacher at a Catholic high school (I think) somewhere in Canada (I think) who has come up with an excellent way for his students to practice structured writing. He has a blog where he posts writing topics and it seems that he has set up a blog for each of his students where they can write their responses and then turn them in by tracking back to his blog. One of his recent assignments was to have his students look at the blogs listed on the blogging scholarship website, choose a blog to vote for, and then to write about why they chose that blog. I think that is such a brilliant use of 21st century technology for a bunch of English students, and I have really been enjoying reading their essays. Mr. Sader’s assignment post is here and you can read the students’ essays by clicking on the list of trackbacks at the bottom of the post.