2014: Half a million satisfied page views

Yes, I have half a million page views. Not bad for someone who only has 650 Twitter followers.

My page views increased from last year, but not by a whole lot. I had 42% more views in the first half of the year, but was down 22% for the second half. As I mentioned, I had an insanely busy first semester, teaching two brand new classes (one not math) and mentoring two teachers. I only had 3 posts in November, and one lonely post in October. I’d hoped to write 72 posts (6/month); in fact I averaged just fewer than 4 posts a month, at 45. That accounts for most of the drop off.

But I also didn’t have the huge posts that I had last year. At the bottom of this post is a list of my top posts overall (1500 views or more).
Here are the top posts I wrote this year (over 1000 views):

Just a Job	2831
The Dark Enlightenment and Duck Dynasty	2527
Strategizing Horror	2027
Encylopedia of Ed, Part I: Things Voldemortean	1802
Ed Schools and Affirmative Action	1776
The Available Pool	1721
Timothy Lance Lai: Reading Between the Lines	1588
College Confidential and Brain Dumping the SAT	1575
SAT’s Competitive Advantage	1392
Reading in the Gulag of Common Core	1236
Finding the Bad Old Days	1224
A Talk with an Asian Dad	1156
Memory Palace for Thee, but not for Me	1128
Multiple Answer Math Tests	1086
Parents and Schools	1067
Math Instruction Philosophies: Instructivist and Constructivist	1022
Why I Blog	1016
Advanced Placement Test Preferences: Asians and Whites	1008

In all, 41 posts out of the 244 got over one thousand views in 2014 alone (not counting views from prior years).

Compared to last year, I had far fewer big posts. Compared to posts written in prior years, this year’s posts did far less business. Also, the disappearance of both Who Am I and About from my top posts means I had far fewer new readers.

I’m not bothered by this. First, I chose a bunch of esoteric topics. Fox, dammit, not hedgehog. Second, as I said, I had an incredibly busy second half of the year.

Third, when I did have time to write, I spent all the time researching. These pieces consumed well over hundreds of hours of googling and reading:

• The Available Pool
• Finding the Bad Old Days
• Just a Job
• TFA Diversity and the Credibility Gap
• Ed Schools and Affirmative Action
• Advanced Placement Test Preferences: Asians and Whites
• Profiting from Master’s Degrees
• Doug Lemov’s Creation Myth

Only three of them made my top posts. Meanwhile, I knocked out The Dark Enlightenment and Duck Dynasty in 2 hours one very late evening and it hits second place. Again, I’m not complaining. If Steve Sailer or Charles Murray isn’t interested in a post, it’s unlikely to get big numbers on the first viewing.

I also didn’t spend much time on pedagogy this year, and that’s something I vow to change in the upcoming year. I have all sorts of topics that I don’t think of as much because I’m teaching advanced math. The following pedagogy posts got at least 1000 views, got more readers this year than last, despite being over 2 years old, and three of them made my top posts for the year:

• Binomial Multiplication
• Kicking Off Triangles
• Banging Your Head with a Whiteboard
• Mapping Real Life with Coordinate Geometry
• Teaching Polynomials

Multiple Answer Math Tests, written this year, also got over 1000 views, and a lot of my older curriculum work gets close to 1000 views.

This reinforces a pattern I’ve seen for over two years: Google likes my blog, and teachers like my curriculum. Teachers are not a big part of my regular reader base, but they seem to find my work and if they didn’t like it, google would know somehow. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that teachers might be finding my pedagogy useful.

I am also reminded that the teacher tales, which I consider some of my best work, are not google friendly. Teachers really like my stories, but since they aren’t part of my regular base, they don’t often stumble across my work. I’m not sure how to address this—I mean, how often does someone think “Hmm, I want to google some fun teacher stories!”?

In the meantime, I thought my Teacher Tales from this year were very good. Hey. Maybe I could do a page. Huh.

• A Talk With An Asian Dad—Offered up as evidence that I really don’t hate Asian immigrants.
• Learning from Mr. Singh–It’s not true that “kids know” who the good teachers are. (They do know who the bad classroom managers are.)
• Building Narratives–A good insight into me as a writing teacher.
• Teaching: The Movie–Oh sheriff, you’ve saved us!
• In Teaching, Even Caitlin Flanagan Has Her Uses–another one on teaching writing.
• Strange Happenings of the Everyday—in the middle of math class, pretend a deranged gunman is trying to break into the classroom.

I will update my Encyclopedia of Ed pages pretty soon–it’s clear they are getting some use, which is nice.

Finally, the second half of this year did see some disillusionment on my part. Not with teaching, or with writing, but with the realization of just how many people in education reform are poseurs, and yet are treated as experts simply because they’ve got an employer claiming they are. I thought I was cynical to begin with, but at this point I’ve become exhausted realizing just how many people are just flat out regurgitating opinions that their employer pays them to have.

On to year 4.

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Posts getting over 1500 views this year:

Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud	8577	2013
Homework and grades.	3590	2012
The Dark Enlightenment and Me	3058	2013
Binomial Multiplication and Factoring Trinomials with The Rectangle	2524	2012
SAT Prep for the Ultra-Rich, And Everyone Else	2490	2012
Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing	2419	2012
Core Meltdown Coming	2317	2013
The Dark Enlightenment and Duck Dynasty	2527	2014
The Gap in the GRE	2213	2012
College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences	2151	2013
Strategizing Horror	2027	2014
Philip Dick, Preschool and Schrödinger’s Cat	1818	2013
Encylopedia of Ed, Part I: Things Voldemortean	1802	2014
Ed Schools and Affirmative Action	1776	2014
The Available Pool	1721	2014
Teaching Algebra, or Banging Your Head With a Whiteboard	1640	2012
Timothy Lance Lai: Reading Between the Lines	1588	2014
Kicking Off Triangles: What Method is This?	1554	2012
College Confidential and Brain Dumping the SAT	1575	2014