Murray/Sailer on Powerline Podcast

This is more of a comment than a fully-developed article, but I though I’d try to be timely. It refers to part one of Steve Hayward’s conversation with Charles Murray and Steve Sailer for the Power Line podcast.

It was as great (as expected), but Charles Murray had one response that I don’t think Steve Hayward followed up on enough, and it’s important. At one point, Murray says, accurately, that conservatives don’t like to talk about race and cognitive ability. It makes them uncomfortable. He then added that the cognitive ability aspects of education totally mess with the permanent libertarian zeitgeist that says hard work is everything.

As it happens, I’ve written about this a lot. My favorite piece about a conservative who is made uncomfortable by a frank reference to race and education was written in response to a podcast as well: Making Rob Long Uncomfortable in which Heather MacDonald goes off on a rant about black underperformance. Rob’s response is a textbook case of discomfort. He was fine talking about bad schools and lazy teachers, but when MacDonald goes there you can, as I said, practically hear Rob’s toes shrieking across the bathroom tiles. It’s hilarious. I then do some verb conjugation on the hypocrisy of the right on this point. (“They’re reactionary fascists, you’re unreasonably censorious, I’m judicious in setting limits.”) Not, I hasten to add, that the left isn’t in hideous shape on this point.

I also mention the fact that few conservatives, in their review of the craziest of the libertarian batshits, Bryan Caplan, mentioned the obvious racial implications in his book The Case Against Education. Hard to tell whether I was more infuriated by Caplan, who combines “let’s kill public education” with “let’s open the borders”, or the dozens of conservative media reviews that never mentioned the obvious racial implications of his policies. I wrote a whole series on Caplan’s book, as I found it exceptionally dishonest when it wasn’t just being facile: How Did We Get Here?,  Pre-Employment Testing, Toe Fungus Prevention,How Well Are Americans Educated? and the one in which I go through the ramifications of Caplan’s policies on black Americans,  Average Was Always Over.

What Murray didn’t mention, and I was surprised Steve Sailer didn’t, is that there’s a perfectly good political reason why conservatives don’t acknowledge the racial dimensions of cognitive ability. Conservatives and libertarians all want to destroy public schools. And by “conservatives”, I generally mean it’s an openly expressed Republican policy, one that actually isn’t shared by the conservative think tanks that focus in on education in any responsible way. Rick Hess, Robert Pondiscio, and Nat Malkus aren’t thrilled with public schools and they support charters and vouchers (at least I believe they do), but they don’t call for the wholesale elimination of public schools. More importantly, Republican voters don’t share this disdain (check out the EdNext poll–barely 50% of Republicans support charters, for example, and that’s one of the higher numbers.) But among Republican and conservative politicians and media it is entirely normal to hold that public schools are sewers of inadequacy and incompetence. Current buzzwords: “let the funding follow the student not the building”, and all that.

Or there’s this recent example by Governor Ducey of Arizona announcing summer school for low-performing kids:

That’s why the plan is to hire teachers who work in schools currently graded A, B or C, though there may be some outreach to teachers in lower-rated schools who have a proven record of performance.

“We’re going to find a way to take people that are skilled in the profession, allow them to make additional funds, and bring our kids up to grade level,” the governor said.

I could write a whole article on the gefukt thinking behind this comment. Teachers in A, B, or C schools aren’t generally any better; they just have smarter students.  They will be far less able to deal with low-performing students. And oh, by the way, summer school won’t bring kids up to grade level. Behind it all is the assumption that low-performing kids are the result of low-performing teachers.

Needless I totally disagree with this position, and think most of the people espousing an all choice system in which parents spend government dollars on private schools haven’t….quite thought through all the ramifications. Or cost. But leave that aside.

You can’t call schools failing and useless and horrible and all that and then talk about different racial group cognitive abilities.  You can’t rail at teachers for failing to close the achievement gap and then say   yeah, well, some of that gap might be cognitive. Kills the moment.

So politically, in order to keep at playing Charlie Brown to the teachers’ union’s Lucy, the whole conservative political and elite class have to ignore any possibility that schools are, actually, doing a pretty good job once you control for IQ.

Second point: towards the end of the podcast, Steve Hayward asks about the possibility of Asian and Hispanics shifting more towards the GOP, “now that Trump is gone”–which is weird, because Trump did better with Hispanics and blacks than any GOP president since Bush at least, so one would think they’d say “build on Trump’s success”, but ok. The particulars of the Asian vote change revolved around the open discrimination they face in elite school admissions.

I keep meaning to write more about this, but I think Steve Sailer will understand what I mean: Republicans should think carefully about openly courting Asian voters, at least using the rhetoric I keep hearing. As Steve used to say, Republicans could go for increasing the Hispanic vote or increasing their white vote. SImilarly, chasing the Asian vote by pushing for admissions-based testing without fixing the many problems with it might just hurt the GOP percentage of the white vote around the edges.

A while back I almost wrote a piece called Everybody’s Second Favorite, that was going to include this passage:

But a school that’s 50% Asian or black  and the other half majority white will in a few years be 80% Asian or black.  Whites don’t hang around for blacks or Asians, in my experience. (emphasis mine this time round.)

Next, whites do tolerate genuine racial diversity well, probably because there are fewer cultural distortions that arise with both Asians and African Americans.  I can think of a number of 30-30-30-10 schools that hold on to those numbers for a decade or more.

“White flight” from Asians has been around for 20 years or more, long enough for the Wall Street Journal to notice it back in 2005. I wrote recently about the decline in white applications to the eight NYC specialized high schools. Whites and Asians are both about 15% of the NYC public school population, have roughly the same admission rate to the specialized high schools, but Asians apply at twice the rate that whites do. Whites just don’t want to go. Bloomberg’s choice programs allowed people who found the Asian culture at these schools unpleasant to set up their own “soft” choice programs. I found a second dataset for another test-based admissions high school, and will be publishing pretty soon, I hope. (I have a day job, so take “soon” with some salt.) Asian test prep that goes on for years and years, not a few weeks, sets up what I believe are false positives but we can argue that point later.

By all means, Republicans should actively pursue growing their Asian vote, but I don’t advise doing it by giving Asian immigrants what they want in public schools, because what they want generally turns off all American parents, particularly white ones. And one rule of public education that also works with politics is don’t piss off the white folks. There are plenty of ways to improve public education and university admissions without discriminating against Asians or rewarding several years of test prep. Talk about those.

Oh, and by the way, don’t talk to Asians or Hispanics about how stupid the Democrats were to cave to teachers unions to close the schools, since all categories of non-whites were (and probably are) far more supportive of remote education than whites, but that’s another article I’m working on.

Finally, Steve Hayward said they would be talking about college next week. Really? I hope not.

Again, great discussion. Looking forward to next week even if it’s about college.

Hey, got this done in under 24 hours. I should rewrite this but I’m tired, so it will have to do.

Ten Most Read, Ten You Should Read

Eight years ago, on the second anniversary of my blog, I asked, “Am I a hedgehog or a fox?”  Hilarious, that I could ever be so deluded. I understand why my brain thinks itself a hedgehog, but it will just have to cope with reality.

I am a fox. Even at my lowly level of the word, this is a list only a fox could produce.

Ten Most Read Articles:

1. More than Gotcha: Kamala’s Busing Blunder— June 28, 2019
   The only item past its sell date. Most of my work maintains its relevance. But this article, outdated though it is, has a good number of my strengths on display. First, unlike the entire media class, I know how to search for and use relevant history. No one listening should have thought anything other than “that’s bullshit” when she claimed to have been on the frontlines of segregation in Berkeley, CA. But no journalist bothered to do the research. Next, I understood as no one else seemed to that she was essentially coming out in favor of busing.  At a time when most of the media (and all of Twitter) was wowed, I  pointed out she’d almost certainly have to walk that comment back. The other strength: sometimes I really hate people while many other folks are like, man, why is Ed hating on her and then later they go oh, I get it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
2. Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud–October 8, 2013
   I’ve kind of cornered the market in Asian immigrant criticism–not of the people, but of the culture, which I think is very damaging to American education. I wouldn’t make such a big deal out of it if everyone else weren’t determined not to notice. This was the first time I wrote about it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
   
3. Functions vs. Equations: f(x) is y and more — May 24, 2015
   A math curriculum piece in third place? Blew me away. But as I mentioned, curriculum searches are specific and get through Google’s recency bias, so they’re the one article category that still gets fed via search engines. I keep meaning to revisit this article because it had a very bimodal reaction. Mathy readers who didn’t teach were aggravated and confused by the article and told me I didn’t understand the math. On the other hand, a number of professors on Twitter understood my point  instantly and were very appreciative (and some later commented as well). I think the mathy folks thought I was confusing a system with a function, whereas the professors understood I was using an example of multiple equations that wasn’t a system to show students a difference they hadn’t seen before.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
4. Homework and grades–February 6, 2012
   I have relatively few strong views about what teachers should do. Homework is the exception. Homework is insane. Grades are fraud.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
5. Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing— August 19, 2012
   My first really huge piece, and one I’m still quite fond of. It’s getting harder to find data easily; more states are hiding racial and economic distinctions. But if you look at current data, you’ll see the same pattern: poor whites do about as well as non-poor blacks and Hispanics. Been like that for decades.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
6. Philip Dick, Preschool and Schrödinger’s Cat — April 5, 2013
   Canonical Ed on IQ.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
7. Binomial Multiplication and Factoring Trinomials with The Rectangle— September 14, 2012
   Another curriculum piece. I took a long time to make sure the figures and explanations were thorough. I hope other teachers get good use from it. Still the best way to teach factoring, even if your kids don’t use it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
8. The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”— July 1, 2012
   This is one of my favorite pieces. It’s all true, still. Every word. And new teachers have to come to grips with it every year.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
9. The SAT is Corrupt. No One Wants to Know.–December 31, 2014
   I am adamantly opposed to grades-based college admissions. But the College Board is corrupt. The international SAT is corrupt. And they’ve changed it in ways to make it far less useful, all in the hopes of ending the score gap, which was never going to happen.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
10. The Gap in the GRE–January 28, 2012
    Another of my favorite pieces that asks a very good question: why are genuine high achievers in verbal tests so less frequent than in math tests? Note that in the intervening years, the College Board and the ETS have eliminated all the verbal difficulty in the SAT and the GRE.

So there’s my ten most popular.

Then I just looked over all my articles and looked for favorites that also captured my zeitgeist (can people have zeitgeist?). I was particularly looking for self-contained articles–a lot of time I go down one rabbit hole and then get to the main point. (Yes, I’m thinking of those for my rewrite plans.) I also wanted a good sample.

1. Teacher Quality Pseudofacts, Part II–January 15, 2012
   This is a top 20 all-time post and was a steady performer for years. I almost didn’t include it; today it seems kind of old hat. But in fairness, that’s like saying 1933’s 42nd Street is cliché because it uses all the old tropes about movie musicals. It didn’t use them. It invented them. When I wrote this article, it was common wisdom that teachers were low-skilled, low-quality, and not very bright. Only the terminally uninformed, the amateurs and the hacks,  have made that claim in four or five years.  I like to think Pseudofacts has had something to do with that change,  because of the very easily found data I brought to light.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
2. The false god of elementary school test scores–July 30, 2012
   Another one I almost didn’t include because it definitely has the rabbit hole problem about Rocket Ship at the beginning. However, like Pseudofacts, it’s an early example of my actually looking at readily available information and pointing out the obvious. Plus, great title.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
3. The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform–September 7, 2012
   I wrote a history of modern education reform throughout much of 2020-21. This was a history of earlier policy. But the definition of fallacy I include here holds for the entire era.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
4. The Day of Three Miracles— April 28, 2015
   I don’t often talk about colleagues, mainly because for years my relationship with them was….fraught. Not bad, just…there. But this is not only a colleague story, it captures a conundrum that few people in education policy seem to understand. Access or rigor. Not both.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
5. Citizens, Not Americans— June 16, 2016
   I love this piece. By the way, Dwayne is married, has a kid, and is in the military. Abdul went to a top tier school and majored in pharmacy, and when he told me I want “Gack!” and he said “yeah, I know. Stupid move.” and now he’s getting an MA in nurse practitioner, or whatever it’s called. Haven’t heard from Chuy. Wing and Benny still teach. One of them is now department chair, and I had a lot to do with it.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
6. “Get Out” a scathing satire? Get Out.–January 22, 2018
   I love movies, and I know as much about American diversity as anyone in the country, and I think this is a terrific review that isn’t at all what you’ll expect.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
7. Algebra 2, the Gateway Course–January 28, 2018
   Another story about colleagues, students, and really stupid education policy.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
8. Making Rob Long Uncomfortable–December 24, 2018
   Silly title, but you can listen to the podcast and see what I mean. It’s well-written, and captures a certain mindset among the centrist conservative punditocracy. As I wrote: “You could practically hear Rob’s toenails shrieking against the tiles as he braked to a stop.  This was not the conversation he’d signed up for. He was there to lightly mock feminists and social justice nuts, not crack witty, on-the-nose jokes with Heather about the racial skills deficit.”
   ignore me, lazy way to space
   
9. The Students of My Christmas Present— December 25, 2018
   I don’t often get sentimental. And I’ve put up Christmas trees most years since.
   ignore me, lazy way to space
10. Idiosyncratic Explanations for Teacher Shortages–May 31, 2019
    Here I raise an issue that seems quite obvious, but isn’t. We have thousands, if not millions, of unemployed PhDs who will never get a tenured job and work as poorly paid adjuncts. Why don’t they become teachers? After all, everyone says we need smarter teachers, right? There’s a cognitive dissonance revealed in the fact that everyone understands that a poorly paid PhD is acting rationally in refusing to take a better-paid, more secure job with great benefits.
    ignore me, lazy way to space
    I thought I was done, but 2017 spoke up, really pissed off. Why nothing? I tried reassurance. It was nothing personal. I wrote some good shit that year. Besides, 2020 and 2021 aren’t represented either. But it would not be assuaged and as my mother isn’t doing well, and this is a not only an ode to American schools but also a lovely story about my mom, an extra…
    ignore me, lazy way to space
11. What the Public Means by “Public Education”–March 19, 2017
    When education reformers wonder why everything went wrong, they should think about the thoughts expressed here.

Thanks for reading.

Celebrating the Decennium

December 31, 2011. I set a goal. The first ten years of the new century were a bit stressful and unfocused. The dot-com bust hit me hard. I found work but had a lot of down time. New Years’ goals helped force me to use the downtime in search of some other goal. in forcing me to me structure the year. In 2001 I vowed to follow through on grad school, a goal I achieved, but left me with more down time. The ironic outcome of meeting that goal was a radical and permanent career change in an direction utterly unrelated to my field of study–no surprise, really, given that my first degree was in English and I went into tech. On December 31, 2007, having spent five years comfortably living as a test prep instructor and tutor, I decided to get a teaching credential. I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach full time,  but it’d be a good thing to have in the back pocket. I got my applications done in a week, entered a program in June of the same year. Six months later the 2008 crash revealed that “tutor” is a luxury item that the rich cut when their stocks tank, so I decided I may as well use the credential I was studying for. Six months after that I got my third college diploma and second master’s that, for the first time, was actually related to my future career plans.

In 2010 I left off professional goals and decided to lose weight, and did, and kept it off  until I started sharing a house with my brother five years later. He was like an invasive species on my eating habits and it took me another five years to recover.

My track record with New Year’s resolutions having been pretty successful in the oughts, I decided to see if I could set a goal for my writing. By this time, I was deeply cynical (although certainly adequate to the occasion) about the prospects of regular publication. Most teachers who get published do so by singing the song someone else wants to hear: union advocacy, education reform, school choice, merit pay, anti-union. Find a think tank who needs a shill. That way wasn’t going to work for me. Some teachers get published because they write deeply and well about their topic (Ben Orlin, Michael Pershan), but I don’t drill down on any one thing. I had been published, and that pathway was clear:  write an 750-word op-ed with an uncomplicated narrative and easily grasped data and hope it captured some editor’s eye. I did this successfully twice, and three other times came close. But “750 words in an uncomplicated and easily grasped op-ed” doesn’t describe me very well.

By that December evening, I hadn’t even tried to write anything for publication for a year. I missed writing. But I also acknowledged another truth: getting published in the traditional sense would require endless attempts and eternal rejection.

Consider one of the more popular teacher writers, Roxanna Elden. She became a teacher in 2003,  came up with her book idea in 2005, spent four long years workshopping her book in writing conferences while looking for an agent. She started a standup routine to increase her name recognition. Her book got published in 2009 by a publisher that abandoned her category shortly afterwards, picked up again in 2013. Then she quit teaching.

I wouldn’t call Elden a teacher. She’s a writer who spent every waking hour outside of her teaching job working on getting published. Hey, more power to her, but I actually want to teach, not spend ten hours a day building a writing career.

Besides, it’s not just that I don’t want to take Elden’s route, but I actively find it….repellent. I love my job, and that means I don’t want to spend 80% of my time outside of work shilling and planning for a career in which I pretend to be an expert at a job that’s just the venue to what I really want.

By 2011, I’d long since accepted that a constant in all my careers was my disinterest in selling my wares. Fifteen years as a consultant and eight (by then) as a tutor had revealed a life path that didn’t requir active promotion. As a consultant, I got work through interviews for open positions, great references and an awesome niche resume. As a tutor, I got work because parents thought I was fantastic and told others. I never had a website, never did outreach. (The teacher hiring process came as a huge shock to me, and I still count myself lucky I found work, considering all my disadvantages and the lousy hiring environment in 2009.)

People who want excellence or experience and don’t care about niceties find me via word of mouth.  You don’t build that sort of reputation by spending all your outside time focusing on an entirely different objective. Besides, if endless marketing and pitching repels me, rejection outright horrifies me. So if my goal was to continue writing, I had to accept that my past two years of failure to publish would probably continue. I wouldn’t be capable of making the changes in my writing, focus, or behavior that might–just might–get me more recognition.

That night, I thought hey, why not a blog? I could write what I want, develop ideas, find an audience–and more importantly, find an audience my way, find people who liked my ideas without having to sell a middleman.

And so I began.

The first three years of this blog were successful beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I joined Twitter in June 2012, which did a great deal to build my immediate audience, but the vast majority of my referrals came from search engines. In 2016, something changed. Despite the fact that I was writing as much, my traffic dropped dramatically.  In the years 2013-2016, I got between 50 and 60 thousand search engine referrals–the vast majority of it for older articles.  Starting in 2017, search engines dropped to 30K and then kept going down. My writing output didn’t decrease dramatically until 2020, so that’s not the reason. My Twitter referrals have actually increased over that time, with a slight dropoff in referrals in the last two years, but nothing drastic.

I’m pretty sure my blog got hit by  Google’s recency bias, which really hurts writers like me who aren’t super well known but have high data value posts.

(For an example of recency bias that anyone can understand, try a one word search, without specifics. Like recently, I googled “Aladdin” and got hit with a billion entries for the 2019 Will Smith version. The Disney 1992 animated version is just out of the top 100 movie box office hits adjusted for inflation, and was the 8th biggest moneymaker in the country two years in a row. The Will Smith version had crap reviews but did hit #8 in the box office in 2019, disappearing from sight the next year. And as long as we’re being thorough, there’s a pretty famous book in which Aladdin made his first appearance? Nowhere to be found. Brave’s results (shoutout to Brenden Eich) are better–still top heavy for Will Smith but does include a lot of results for 1992 film and even a Time article on the character Aladdin.

That’s recency bias. No sense of context. If you don’t create really specific searches, then Google is going to reward whatever was in the news last.)

I am not blaming Google for my reduced output, nor am I terribly upset about the decline in traffic. The first three years of my blog exceeded my wildest dreams, but I’ve been happy with my audience and from a prestige standpoint, my Twitter audience is appropriately think-tanky, academic, and media-ish. But the impact of Google’s recency bias does bother me. In 2015, Amy Wax quoted my blog in a response to a letter. That was cool. I don’t think Amy Wax reads me (and if she does, someone should let me know!). She probably found the article in google, and that’s the kind of find that Google is making harder.

Coupled with my non-existent marketing and promotion department, it becomes quite possible that more and more of my work is just disappearing into the bowels of the internet, undiscovered by all but the most dedicated googler. That 2013-2015 had so many hits is proof of how many  people found my articles through searches. A lot of my one-off audience isn’t finding me anymore.

By far the biggest challenge I face in keeping this blog going is not “google algorithms are biased against me” but rather “I quit writing.” Beginning in 2018, my work was more sustained and took a lot of research. I enjoy doing that, but it was definitely reducing my output. The real crash began in late 2019, when I took on the Bush/Obama era history of education. I don’t regret the focus, but the timing was terrible. The work on that, added to the rise of covid19, the closing of schools, a complete reworking of the daily tasks of my job, my rage at the whole idiotic response and not incidentally, the disappearance of coffee shops to write in for most of a year, all contributed to a profound drop in output.  I couldn’t even write about classroom action, although I gave some thought to coming up with a Zoom chat session of my students and me. But the editing would have been brutal (removing names) and my god, in remote ed there was always grading to do or curriculum to change or Desmos activities to build.

Then, as I wrote recently, I’ve been having some trouble organizing my thoughts to set the groundwork for future writing. So nothing was easy.

I’m coming out of it. No promises, but I am back to thinking about writing and working on writing rather than having an idea float through my head but get overwhelmed by all the meta involved in crafting the argument and thinking ah, fuck it, I’ll tweet.

The last ten years have been a wonderful and productive era. I began my blog during my third year of teaching, just before  starting with my current district. I have used all my credentials; my boss knows my value. If my teaching career has veered in directions I didn’t expect, it still has brought me tremendous satisfaction. My blog recounts many of the experiences during that time, but also thoughts and analysis of and on a wide range of educational issues, and I’m very proud of it. Consulting and tutoring are short-term gig jobs; I have largely floated through life; outside of family, the list of people I’ve held as friends for more than a decade is a short one. Not just people, either. Behaviors, habits, hell, even restaurants before 2010–I drifted away after a phase or three.

Since I began teaching, I’m a bit more settled, for obvious reasons. While my closest work friend, Bart,  has left teaching (I still mourn him weekly, at least), I am now the fifth most senior teacher in my department (whoo!), and because of my multiple credentials I have contacts with colleagues throughout the school. I am known at the district, and for the right reasons.  The tech guy, principal’s secretary, and attendance clerks all take good care of me, and I still give them presents.  I even have more stable relationships with restaurants, particularly many local Starbucks and my favorite sushi bar.

I want to leave the area, but not teaching, in the next few years. That’s been a consistent objective,  and I’m taking steps to make it happen. However, finding a teaching job as a sixty-something isn’t easy, and I’ve got backup plans in mind.

But for the blog, I’ve got one ask and some plans.

The ask: While I can’t make Google change its recency bias, I would like to make sure my articles are getting read and found. I’m one of those writers who is read but not mentioned by a lot of people with large followings. To those people, I’d ask: hey, mention my work more often. I love the notes and letters. But from an audience perspective, even a critical review of some of my thoughts would probably do me better. Retweet my stuff. Mention it in your own columns. I realize the problem–professional writers are bound by clicks, and my stuff is rarely timely. But if you could do it occasionally, I’d be grateful. It’s about the only productive step that might get Google to recognize me more.

Plans:

1. Write more about curriculum. A review of my most popular articles shows that the curriculum articles are doing very well. Teachers looking for curriculum are specific in their searches, and they’re finding me. I’ll give them more to find. Let’s say, three articles on math curriculum.
2. Remind people of what I’ve already written. I’ve got about 350 articles on this blog. Hell, I don’t even remember all of them. So I will pick three topics and write the Ed equivalent of a position paper. My three identified topics: impact of Asian culture in US education, update on teacher credentials, and boy, wasn’t I right about how college admissions corruptions and fraudulent grades were combining in evil and awful ways.
3. I want to produce a book on my articles–not really because I think it will sell, but because it’d be fun. I’ve started this. So my goal is to complete “Great Moments In Teaching” before next year, with at least two new articles.

Regardless, I will write more.  I get too focused on one article that will take a long time, and resist putting it aside. The reasons for that are obvious (I have almost as many unfinished as finished articles on this blog) but it’s clear that unfinished articles are a price I pay for a reasonable amount of output. I hope to keep remembering that.

Thanks for reading.

Happy New Year.