The 46-year-old high school principal has been an architect, a sheep farmer and a teacher, but in times of crisis or introspection it is the written word he turns to.

His blog finds the marvelous in the every day: students, stacks of paper, a chalk board, pencils – these all become the subjects of his online reverie. They are ways of thinking about himself and his world that often result in open-ended questions.

“How do you educate someone?” he asks in a Jan. 18 blog. “How do you simply teach them? Is it possible to get to know an individual well enough to present them [sic] with some skill or knowledge, and be sure that it will improve their lives?”

He also tries to wake up his readers to the plight of the often-troubled teens he sees before him.

“We sexualize, trivialize, terrorize and anesthetize them. We belittle them, load them with expectations and give them no support to achieve those expectations,” he writes in a Feb. 1 blog. “We've left them to deal with death, AIDS, sex, drug use and addiction, alcoholism, over-materialism and under-emotionalism. We've pampered them so that they can't deal with disappointment; ignored them so that they have no idea what it means to be an adult.”

He says in an interview later: “I had a 14-year-old girl come in, who I talked about ...who had been in drug rehab and had tried to commit suicide. And she’s 14.”

Spokesmen for private and public schools in Maryland say they have no way of knowing how many other principals or teachers in the state are blogging.

Bill Reinhard, public information officer for the Maryland State Department of Education, and Ron Goldblatt, executive director of the Association of Independent Maryland Schools, say their institutions have no rules in place to restrict or monitor teacher Web logs.

But officials do concur there is interest in such chronicles. “Our younger members … are reading blogs like crazy,” says Lissa Brown, assistant executive director of the Maryland State Teachers Association.

Maynard’s blog is contemplative -- in sync with a man who has found his calling. But he can remember a more hectic life as an architect in San Francisco through most of the 1980s. There he eventually became exhausted with “helping a lot of people who didn’t need my help.”

In 1990, he enrolled in a writing program at the University of San Francisco. “I think I was going through a lot of personal introspection, and one of the ways I was getting it out was writing,” he says.

He graduated with a master's degree in writing in June 1992; that December he moved back to the East Coast to a sheep farm near Poolesville, Md. He began volunteering as a teacher in 1994, which he took to naturally, and started the job full time in August 1995 at Thornton Friends School. He taught for three years before becoming principal of the high school.

Maynard started blogging in the winter of 2000, melding his passion for writing with the geeky, tech side of his personality and his new career as a teacher.

Students and former students are now part of his loyal following.

Former student Vanessa Steck, 19, says she had a psychiatric disorder that involved self-mutilation. She followed her travails in his blog.

She says she started her own blog about two years ago after Maynard introduced her to the form. “I had just been released from an 11-day stay in a psychiatric hospital, and I wanted a place to chronicle my struggles and triumphs with mental illness,” she says.  

Today Steck attends Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Md., and checks in with Maynard’s blog every few days. She believes it fits in well with the spirit of the Quaker school.

"Sure, it's unorthodox," she said in an e-mail interview, "but Thornton is an unorthodox place. ... Some people, I'm sure, would say it undermines his authority, the same people who probably would say it undermines his authority for him to be called Norman. To me it enhances his authority by letting him be seen as a three-dimensional ... figure rather than your typical, behind the desk, uncommunicative principal."

As he notes in a Feb. 8 blog, “It's crazy to try and be human.”

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