200 Posts

I did 100 posts in 10 months, but I had a number of ideas backlogged. 200 posts took me 19 months. At the rate I’ve been going, 300 posts will take me 25 months.

I want to change that, but I’m not sure how. I like each essay to be stand alone, and the best way to increase my output is to chunk thoughts. So I did that with Finding the Bad Old Days and Just a Job, which I’d originally planned as one piece. I likewise have chunked Memory Palace for Thee, but Not for Me and the Advanced Placement analysis. But I haven’t gotten back to Memory Palace, and am not sure when I’ll get back to the AP work. On the other hand, if I hadn’t posted that much, when would you all have seen it? I’m still pushing to get to 5 essays a month, but thus far I’ve been hardpressed to keep to four. However, as Mark Zuckerberg said to Cory Booker, “DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT”. Billionaires are all Js, in Myers Briggs terms, so I’m going to try and up the J of this blog and downplay the P-ness. (haha! MB joke, that.)

Anyway. I have just hit 385,000 views, have 560 or so Twitter followers, and have long since given up tracking posts that made over 1000 views. I have nine posts that have exceeded 5,000 page views, four of which I’ve written since October of 2012—in fact, all of four have been written since April of last year.

Leaving popularity aside, here are some favorites from the last 100 posts, in rough order of my preference:

• Philip Dick, Preschool, and Schrodinger’s Cat—This is one of the best things I’ve ever written. Third most popular essay on the site.
• College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences—I like this slightly better than the most heavily visited essay on the site (see below).
• Dan Meyer and the Gatekeepers—Dan is still mad about this, I suspect, but like the one above it, I think it does a great job of building a very logical, well-founded case.
• Core Meltdown Coming: also written in October, as was the Asian immigrant piece. I was on roll.
• Not Why This. Just Why Not That
• NAEP TUDA Scores: Detroit Isn’t Boston and NAEP TUDA Scores: Does Black Poverty Matter?—I wish more people would read these, and not just because they were a lot of work. Big takeaways: yes. Poverty matters after sorting for race. and “free and reduced lunch” is not poverty.
• Asian Immigrants and what No One Mentions Aloud—I like this one a lot, but its popularity kind of shocked me. Blasted past all the other candidates and sits comfortably at the top of the most read queue by a couple thousand page margin.
• SAT’s Competitive Advantage—I like this one because NO ONE is talking about the issues I raised. Some day soon, I will look prescient.
  It’s the Tests, Zitbrains!—entry #7 in my railing about the impact of credential tests on URM teacher population.

• The Negative 16 Problems, and Educational Romanticism—probably my favorite combination of teaching and policy talk I’ve managed.
• What Can We Blame Teacher Unions For
• Content Knowledge and Reading Comprehension: Bold Talk and Backpedaling—I like this one mostly because I got it done. I’ve been mulling this one for ever.
• American Indian Public Charters: What Word Are You Forgetting, People?—AIPC isn’t American Indian, isn’t black, isn’t Hispanic. It is (or was) Chinese.
• The Release, and Dumbing it Down
• In Teaching, Even Caitlin Flanagan Has Her Uses
• Jason Richwine and Goring the Media’s Ox—I was quite angry that the media allowed him to write about cognitive ability until they could use it against him. Tsk, tsk.
  On John Quincy Adams and His Photograph
  Modeling Probability

And if you’re interested, here’s my most recent take on why I blog.

Newcomers, you can check out the Encyclopedias, which I’ve updated:
Encyclopedia of Ed:
Things Voldemortean
The Players
Teaching
Movies, Miscellany, and Me

Repeating myself: this blog has a readership and influence that has wildly exceeded anything I envisioned, not only when I started two years ago, but to this day. Thanks again for following me on twitter, on the blog, for your comments (even when I’m cranky), and for taking the time to stop by.

PS: Go ahead, Pershan, mock me.

Anyway.