2016: Five Years On….and then Trump

Having done three posts in a week–no small task for this slow writer–I was going to abandon a retrospective post this year. My traffic is down, and while I’m not concerned, I thought eh, no reason to write about it.

But I’ve written a retrospective every year. I started this blog on January 1, 2012 as a New Year’s Resolution, and when the anniversy went by I instantly felt a nagging sense of guilt and duty–and so, a retrospection. But not really on my blog.

For the first thirty years of my  working life, I played mostly at the edges of occupations. A friend once introduced me as someone who does “obscure technical things” and that was when I worked at a large corporation. For many years, I made a decent living doing things few people cared about, or thought you could make a living at like, say, tutoring. Teaching is a mainstream, non-niche profession if ever there was one, but I was reminded that my opinions are still niche when I tried to write about my career.  Getting any publication interested in my experiences or observations was a total non-starter. I occasionally got nibbles, but the intersection between what I could write about in 750 words and what someone was interested in publishing was almost non-existent–and I gave up trying rather easily.

And so the blog, with this resolution. I could focus on what interested me, not what was fashionable, and build an audience writing on topics as they occurred to me, not on what was timely. I could maybe start getting my audience to look at education as I did, or find like-minded folks, or both. I achieved more success than I ever dreamed in the first year and every year since has been better.

Then this year, this year that so many in the media rather provincially declare a gruesome annus horribilis, because they’re a bunch of narcissistic puppies who demand we share their misery. But I had a simply splendid time and for reasons directly related to the biography above.

I love politics, but as a spectator sport. My life is as niche as my careers are (custodial divorced parent, first generation college graduate, low six figure income, white, English major working in technology OR teaching math–pick three and you still have trouble forming a club,  much less a political action committee. Heads of households who make too much for the Child Tax Credit: not a big interest group.)

So since I never expected politicians to speak to my interests, I became very interested in determining who politicians were talking to, which eventually led me to realize that politicians were weren’t talking to. Broadly, I realized that politicians were flatly ignoring an important interest group: working people making less than, say, mid-six figures. Note I said “interest group”. Many vote ideology, just as I do, despite their income level and best economic interests. Politicians seemed to be taking this for granted. They were running on issues largely ideological terms, both left and right. But they were ignoring areas that clearly affected and interested wide swathes of the electorate.

I came to this realization via immigration and education, two areas that I’ve been watching and reading about for thirty years. I was unaware of the depth of disaster done by China to manufacturing in this country, but it plays to the same failure to speak to the public’s interests.

So even before Sean Trende pointed it out, I was wondering why no one was making a play for white voters. This realization is one of the issues that led me to notice the great Steve Sailer in the early oughts. Like Steve, I’m not a white nationalist–in fact, I believe that implementing the “Sailer Strategy” would ultimately result in more blacks and Hispanics coming to the GOP. But white voters were a large enough group to make zeitgeist defiance a worthwhile risk. From there, it’s a short step to understanding that the GOP was just giving lip service to immigration and cultural issues because, in part, the conservative elites shared the same values as the media and liberal elites and had no plans to change anything.

Like many others, I’ve long believed elites were engaging in an effort to shut down opposition to these key values. The left and right both brought about political or economic doom for those who went against the grain–no donors to run for office,  shaming, job loss,  whatever was needed to achieve an apology or social and economic obliteration. That’s….not how our country is supposed to work. I have a close friend who said, years ago, that the only person who could break through would be a really rich person who didn’t give a damn about winning approval. I went further than that: I was certain that many in the country were deeply disgusted with the media’s enforcement of the canon, whether or not they called it The Cathedral, and were longing to see someone take them on–and that person, yes, would have to be really rich and already famous.

Enter Trump, but this isn’t about the election. It’s All About Me.

Instead of playing my usual role disengaged but passionate political observer, I was watching a neophyte politician with a genius for stagecraft promoting exactly the ideas that I thought were necessary to win disaffected white voters, using exactly the unapologetic, flagrant violation of media expectations I thought it would take. I had skin in this game. I wanted Trump to win the GOP nomination. I hoped he would win the presidency.

Not only was I fully engaged, but I had genuine understanding and insight into the forces driving the greatest and most shocking presidential campaign in our history. No longer niche, baby.

This mattered to no one but me. My Twitter engagement numbers exploded, but as mentioned, my blog traffic was down. Moreover, I’m not a predictor. I didn’t make any Ann Coulter or Scott Adams calls early on, didn’t go out there like Bill Mitchell and confidently call the election. I’m all about if-then. In fact, while I expected Trump, my hope for his victory was an if-then:

Not faking. If Trump wins despite these polls, it's because they wrongly profiled the voting pool. Which you know, Mr. Demographics. https://t.co/diWf8lkzL7

— EdReal (@Ed_Realist) November 7, 2016

What I valued about the experience isn’t increased fame or respect (“strange new” or otherwise). I cherished the opportunity to really participate in an earthshaking event. When you’ve spent your life in niche issues, reading about politics but not caring terribly who wins or loses,  playing on the main stage, even as one member of a huge choir, is exhilarating.

I watched the whole thing happen. Unlike the vast majority of conventional thinkers that populate the airwaves and web, I understood most of the events. I understood Trump’s popularity. I understood why the media’s anger and outrage only helped him. I understood why he didn’t apologize, didn’t back down, struck hard when attacked. I understood why his voters wanted this.

Thanks to Twitter, I got to voice my disdain of the experts (who often answered, if only to block me), as well as my considerable outrage that cable TV, in particular, gave little time to Trump voters, while over-representing Never Trumpers. (My concern was not for equal time, but for the very real probability, early on, that the Never Trump folks would undo the primary results without giving the opposition a fair hearing. Fortunately, polls intervened.)

Best of all, I found kindred spirits, people who were watching the election with very similar insights and hopes. Ed Asante and David Pinsen were , like me, were  “ordinary” people who happened to support Trump (often referred to as “sane Trump Twitter supporters”), and I thoroughly enjoyed agreeing with them throughout the year.  Media folks Mickey Kaus, Michael Goodwin, and Mark Krikorian also viewed the election through the same lens of media skepticism and enthusiasm for the ideas of Trump, if not necessarily the imperfect vessel himself.

I don’t know if I can adequately convey how much sheer fun I had actively participating, being “on point”to others  unless you, too, are an introvert whose concerns, professional and personal, are usually shared by perhaps a dozen people. Maybe a thousand or so nataionwide. And suddenly, the single biggest issue in my interest area was shared by millions.

I even learned something. While I still believe immigration won Trump the primary, I’m leaning towards the notion that trade was essential to putting him over the top. If it’s true that many Obama voters in the Big 4 (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio) voted for Trump this time round, then that has to be trade, not immigration that moved them. However, Trump couldn’t (and can’t) back down on immigration, because he can’t let down the GOP base.

The campaign period was not without difficulties, but they were all the struggles of any Trump voter: reading your favorite writers express utter disdain for you, never mind Trump, getting blocked early on by conservative writers who simply couldn’t grasp what was happening to their beloved party, feeling outraged at the media’s utterly unhinged misrepresentations and open bias. Nothing to dim the joy I felt.

I don’t know if I’m going to feel more vested in political events going forward. I’m going to enjoy finding out.

So. That is my retrospective on the year.

Blogwise: traffic was down, but I still had more “big” pieces than 2014, which is still my highest traffic year. I’m down from 2015, when I had 11 pieces over 1500, this year I had only 5. The midlists were off–I had no essays with 2000 pageviews, and a ton of work that usually hit 1000 plus views didn’t make it that far. I’ve been looking at the quality and topic of the pieces, and don’t see a huge difference. Given the disconnect between my twitter growth and my blog page views fall-off, I’m thinking it might be a falloff in my teacher readers. I hope not.

But it might just be that haven’t been promoting my work as vigorously. I’ll try to do better.

I set my sights on 48 essays. Hahahahaha. I did make 37, one more than last year! I shall try again for 4 essays a month.

Essays written this year with over 1500 page views:

Title	Date	Views
Notes from a Trump Supporter: It’s the Immigration, Stupid!	01/31/2016	5,147
Defining the Alt Right	09/05/2016	3,499
Citizens, Not Americans	06/16/2016	3,264
The Many Failings of Value-Added Modeling	05/20/2016	1,968
The SAT is Corrupt: Reuters Version	03/29/2016	1,903

Pieces I think are quite good:

Happy Teacher Stories–I think you need to be a skeptical cynic to really deliver in this genre, so I’m born for it:

• Citizens, Not Americans (above), is one of my favorite pieces ever; I was pleased to see it do well. I have a good friend who is a highly-esteemed professor of education, who was devastated by Trump’s win. When we go to lunch, he asks about Dwayne, Chuy, and Omar. And if you want to know how they felt about Trump’s win, check out Celebrating Trump in a Deep Blue Land.
• Graduating My Geometry Class: I taught roughly 75% of my school’s class of 2016, including a group of freshmen four years ago in the first class of my (and their) first year.
• A Clarifying Moment: a student comes back to visit. By the way, Hui brought me some insanely amazing baked goods for Christmas.

Classroom Action

• The Things I Teach: in this case, ELL.
• Realizing Radians–six and a little bit!
• Great Moments in Teaching: The Third Dimension and part 2

Pedagogy

• Negatives, Not Subtraction–important concept that I made great strides on this year
• The Sum of a Parabola and a Line is another parabola, of course, but if you think of it that way, you can easily find the vertex with a series of steps, instead of an algorithm.
• Teaching History in the Trump Era

Teaching Issues–you know, these are all interesting aspects of teaching that most people don’t think about and got little traffic, so pass them on.

• Teaching Oddness #1: Teacher’s Aides, HS Version
• Teaching Oddness #2: Teach More, Get Paid More
• Teaching Oddness #3: What Happens When We’re Absent
• Teaching Oddness #4: Student Teachers
• In Which Ed Explains Induction
• Curriculum Development: Not Work for Hire

Education Policy:

• Vocational Ed: Advancing the Debate
• Vocational Ed and the Elephant
• End of Education Reform?
• White Elephant Students and Charters: A Proposal (written on last day of 2015)

Finally, one piece that may become more viewed in the Trump era: Arizona’s Experience and the Tale It Tells, about the Wall Street Journal’s report on Arizona’s illegal immigration law.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

2015: Turning a Corner. Maybe.

This chart may be complicated, but since these retrospectives mostly function as my diary, I’ll not worry about that.

So here’s the last three years: Year 4 (blue, 2015), Year 3 (yellow, 2014), and Year 2(green, 2013). The last set of columns shows the cumulative traffic for each year. So Year 3 saw slightly higher traffic than Years 2 and 4. In 2015, I saw about 214K views compared to 215 in Year 3 and 223K in 2014, my high point.

If I wanted to, I could be bummed and think man, I’ve had no increase in growth over the past two years. But that’s why the jaggedy lines are there, to cheer me up. They remind me that if I want people to read me, I have to actually write. I put out a grand total of 5 posts in May, June, and July. Five posts! I only got two out in November, too.

Since I get a minimum of 200 page views just by actually posting, those three months cost me a lot of traffic. And since I’m not really in this for the overall traffic, it means I shouldn’t fuss about the lower overall number, and I won’t. Except to remind myself that I need to write more.

In 2014, I set myself the goal of writing 72 posts, and only managed 46. This year, I just managed 36. THIRTY SIX. That’s ridiculous.

Before I go onto the brighter side of last year, I want to write this down, to document my change in productivity. I wrote 108 pieces in my first year. Year 2, 2013, I wrote 61 essays. It’s like that math activity where the kids bounce balls and measure the height. My essay output is a decaying exponential function….Output _year=.75 * Output^year-1.

What the hell have I been doing with my time since? It’s not that I’m lazy, or that I did less research back then. Some of my best, most popular pieces were written in 2012, including 5 of the 18 pieces that saw over 1500 views just this year–or 6 of the top 20, if you prefer that method, but I don’t because it doesn’t allow like to like comparisons. Admittedly, many in that first year were short teaching stories I don’t do anymore (short? Me? Let’s all laugh.), but that just makes it more astonishing. I did some major research and throwaway posts. How?

I’m not out of ideas. I am more than occasionally frustrated by the utter nonsense I see bruited about confidently, by people paid huge heaps of money to be experts. But instead of writing about it, I get bogged down. That’s the problem. I try to do one big piece and cover everything. I need to create bite-sized chunks. The problem, alas, lies in my knowledge of the likelihood that I’d do the next chunk rather than move on to something else.

The problem isn’t the writing. I can knock out essays in relatively little time when I need to. I did On The Spring Valley High Incident in an evening (a very late evening, though), because I wanted my thoughts to be in the mix so timeliness was essential. I got the five political proposals and their bookends done in a month, a magnum opus of focus. (I suspect hocus pocus. Sorry.) The problem is in the organization and structuring, identifying the goals of the piece.

And yet, this studied consideration is often a strength. I spent nearly a month mulling the “explaining your answer” discussion and came up with the first “math zombie” piece, which contributed much more to the longer term discussion than whatever I would have written in the first week. Except, alas, I couldn’t get beyond thinking about it and so didn’t write anything else that month, killing the momentum I built up from August through October.

I read a P-J example in a Myers Briggs book somewhere. The president of a hobbyist club asked for a volunteer to put out a monthly newsletter. The volunteer who responded put out a charming newsletter, filled with fascinating and useful information, a real pleasure to read—but always put out on the third, rather than the first. In frustration, the president took it over herself, and put out a brief, functional newsletter right on time. Or the test question: “Do you think a meeting is successful when everyone leaves knowing what to do, or when every issue has been thoroughly explored?”

Which is not to say that everything done to task on time is always dry and boring. Mickey Kaus quotes someone else (I forget who) saying that he writes faster than anyone who writes better, and better than anyone who writes faster.

I will put more emphasis this year into improving my essay entry procedures, to stop putting off the challenging task of structuring a piece so that I can write it. Moreover, I was once able to write more than one piece at a time, putting out something simple and descriptive (say, on curriculum) while working on a larger piece. I need to get back to that.

I’m going to try to get back up to consistently four pieces a month. Wish me luck.

Now, on the bright side:

While 2014 saw the most consistent traffic, year 3 was also a relatively unpopular year. Of those 42 pieces, only 18 of them saw over 1000 views that year. My usual benchmark is 1500, and only eight made it over that mark.

This last year was much better. A full 24 of my paltry output of 36 pieces saw traffic over 1000 views; 11 made it over 1500. The most popular essay in 2014 was 2,800 views; this year my international SAT piece saw over 6,000 hits. My college remediation piece and the one on the gaokao got over 4,000.

These numbers are nowhere near my average essay popularity of 2013, the year of my all-time popular piece on Asians, as well as my Philip K. Dick piece on IQ, both of which went over 6,000–and that was just the start. I did some good work that year, and I’m pleased that 2015 was at least in the hunt.

So even though 2014, year 3, was the high point traffic wise, my new work received much more attention this year.

Some highlights:

• My seven essay series on unmentionable education policies, most of which topped the 1500 mark–the rest just missed. I’m most proud that I gritted my teeth and followed through, devoting the entire month of August and not giving up.
• What You Probably Don’t Know About the Gaokao highlights my ability to go deep and make a whole bunch of information digestible by the casual viewer–and got lots of traffic for my troubles.
• I did carry through on my vow to write more about math, showing different aspects of my teaching and writing. Illustrating Functions is a nice pedagogy piece, while functions vs. equations sparked some tremendous discussions throughout the math community. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Jake’s Guest Lecture and The Test that made them go Hmmmm is an accurate representation of my classroom discussions. The zombie sessions with my private student capture my strength as an explainer. I also contined to build my series on multiple answer math tests, and what I can learn from the student responses.
• I was offered a chance to write an op-ed in a major media outlet about my college remediation policy! I had to turn it down! The downside of anonymity. Although really, is it so terrible a newspaper publish an anonymous op-ed? They use anonymous sources and expect us to believe the journalists have used their judgment. (cough). So why not op eds? But still, it was great to be asked.
• My Grant Wiggins eulogy—and may I say to Grant, wherever his spirit is, you’re sorely missed.

The pieces that didn’t get as much attention, but should have:

• Education: No Iron Triangle: Cheap, Fast, Excellent–pick two. Not in ed.
• The Day of Three Miracles–a colleague and I discuss two conflicting goals. Get more students to the highest level of math, or move more students out of the bottom two levels?
• Group Work vs. Working In Groups—this is important, because a lot of traditionalists think they’re the same thing.
• Handling the Teacher Perks–I actually take two days off!
• Handling Teacher Preps—here’s something that few discuss despite being an essential determinant in teacher workload.
• Troubling Students–it’s not the ones you might guess.

On a personal note, my granddaughter has a new baby brother! My next generation is expanding. And while I like to beat myself up for not writing more, I didn’t waste the time. I had a wonderful year of travel that took me to amazingly beautiful sights, multiple, happy family get-togethers necessitating time spent preparing fabulous food, and oh, yes, I taught a grand class or two. It was a fun year.

So let’s see if I’ve turned the corner on the productivity slump for 2016. Wish me luck.

Below are the pieces that had over 1500 hits.

Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud	10/08/13	6,948
The SAT is Corrupt. No One Wants to Know.	12/31/14	6,329
Homework and grades.	02/06/12	4,491
Ed Policy Proposal #1: Ban College Level Remediation	08/01/15	4,360
What You Probably Don’t Know About the Gaokao	01/18/15	4,325
On the Spring Valley High Incident	10/27/15	2,948
Five Education Policy Proposals for 2016 Presidential Politics	07/31/15	2,944
Evaluating the New PSAT: Math	04/16/15	2,866
Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing	08/19/12	2,717
Binomial Multiplication and Factoring Trinomials with The Rectangle	09/14/12	2,699
Education Policy Proposal #2: Stop Kneecapping High Schools	08/02/15	2,253
I Don’t Do Homework	02/15/15	1,799
Education Policy Proposal #3: Repeal IDEA	08/07/15	1,708
Teachers and Sick Leave: A Proposal	05/26/13	1,629
SAT Prep for the Ultra-Rich, And Everyone Else	08/17/12	1,616
Education Policy Proposal #4: Restrict K-12 to Citizens Only	08/16/15	1,582
Kicking Off Triangles: What Method is This?	11/12/12	1,572
Functions vs. Equations: f(x) is y and more	05/24/15	1,514

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.

*****************************
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

2013: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

Am I a hedgehog or a fox?

Certainly my life choices reflect a fox. At four or five, people would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up, and I had no idea. By the time I was a teenager, I knew this lack of focus, this tendency to be relatively good at a bunch of things but outstanding (at my own level) at nothing in particular, was going to be a problem. I’ve had four or five separate occupations, several of which I describe in this post, an essay that pretty much says “fox” from start to finish—as does my essay on acquiring content knowledge through reading, I think. For a person with little ambition, I’ve successfully used my brains to make a decent living in those four or five occupations; for eighteen years I averaged 25 hour work weeks (in tech, averaged over the year, in tutoring, over the month) and raised a son on the income. (I work more hours now as a teacher, but I also get paid vacations, something I had only five years out of the previous thirty.)

Until I began tutoring and then teaching, I never felt I was using more than a fraction of my intellect and almost none of my interest. Teaching test prep and then tutoring in a wide range of areas, in contrast, grabbed me from the start. I was using the full range of my intellect, first to learn two major tests and the middle and high school curricula in three subjects. Then, when I started teaching, I was fascinated by the challenges of developing curriculum and engaging and motivating students, to name just two of many job attractions.

But in teaching, I’m a fox as well, teaching three subjects, test prep even now in four major tests (twelve earlier in my career), and morph pretty effortlessly from one subject to another, day to day and, back when I was a tutor, hour to hour. I’m not trying to win converts to any subject other than classic films. No hedgehog as a teacher, certainly. Teaching has given my writing focus and purpose; I have actually stopped looking for tutoring work because I have more time for writing.

Despite all this, as a thinker and writer, I see myself as a hedgehog. Yes, you can laugh. But this collection of essays is premised entirely on the Voldemort View, that all the policy, all the teacher training, all the curriculum arguments run up against the reality of cognitive ability, and that our refusal to accept this reality is having terrible consequences.

Everything I write begins with that premise.

And yet. I’ve convinced a good many people that teachers aren’t low-achieving, scoffed at the pretend fuss over the lack of minority teachers, but also argue that teacher intelligence, past a certain level, doesn’t appear to be that important. I routinely remind my readers that students in the middle third of the cognitive spectrum forget most of what they were taught, that teaching algebra is like banging your head with a whiteboard, and that no one has had success teaching advanced math to the moderately retarded, but I also talk about the joys of teaching kids with low motivation and low (for high school) cognitive ability. I’ve been arguing, lately, that many recent Asian immigrants are not as smart as their test scores might indicate, and am starting to wonder if black ability might not in some cases, underrepresented by test scores. IQ purists scoff at my opinion that we haven’t really investigated how, and what, we can teach people with lower than average cognitive ability—more than one reader has derided my comment here as goofy idealism.

I get all that, but they all feel linked to the same idea. While I don’t write about other subjects much, I have the same notion: a small number of fundamental ideas inform all my opinions. I have changed my mind on these fundamental ideas, and it’s always a pretty big deal for me, something I remember and acknowledge. That sounds more hedgehoggish than fox, someone who is driven by central ideas, as opposed to a million flexible gametime decisions about important issues as they arise.

So I feel like a hedgehog, but any examination of my life or interests leads inexorably to the fox.

Isaiah Berlin originated the fox/hedgehog paradigm to explore Tolstoy’s psyche: “Tolstoy, in Berlin’s telling, was torn between the hedgehog’s quest for a single truth and the fox’s acceptance of many and, at times, incommensurable truths.” Berlin argues that Tolstoy’s final years were ruined because he wanted to be a hedgehog but could not deny his essential foxiness.

Well, I ain’t ruining my second half being fussed by deciding which side of the dichotomy I fit in with. But I will say this: time and again, I find that people build “if…then” constructs from fundamental ideas that I didn’t sign on to. These people are then annoyed at me for backtracking, inconsistency, or some other sin of logic.

So, for example, the basic Voldemort View: Mean differences in group IQs are the most likely explanation for the achievement gap in racial and SES groups. Or, cognitive ability is the chief determinant of academic ability and other life outcomes.

People build all sorts of “if…thens” from this. If IQ is not malleable, then a high IQ group is superior and more desirable than a low IQ group. If cognitive ability determines academic academic, then it’s not worth educating people with lower cognitive abilities. If higher test scores, then higher academic ability. If smarter, then better. And a host of others.

Hell, no. I’m not backtracking. I’m not in denial. I’m saying, categorically, that these things do not necessarily follow. I refuse to accept all those if…then constructs just because I accept the reality of cognitive ability. No superiority or preference follows directly. I can pick and choose the if…then constructs that interest me from that point–and none of the ones above interest me at all. And I can change my mind–for example, I’ve become noticeably more skeptical of higher test scores (although I still think in the main they’re good).

Of course, maybe that refusal to lock in the “if…thens” is what makes me a fox. Huh.

Anyway. The point of all this is to introduce the essays that got the most traffic this year. The numbers are from the last 365 days only. I have made the cutoff 1500 views—whoo hoo! (well, close. I let a 1490 slip in.) Just under half of them (10 out of 22) were written last year. I am not bothered by this. Many of my posts have high information content, others are used by teachers as lesson guides. Google likes me a lot. But I only wrote 61 posts this year, an average of 5 per month.

Traffic growth was huge.

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
12	2878	1326	932	912	1107	3764	6485	10303	5466	5986	14574	13851	67584
23	11846	9416	11386	18306	22891	12032	14086	23491	19077	26747	27296	19265	215839

As I said when the blog hit 200,000 views, this seems like a tremendous amount of activity for someone who barely averages five posts a month. I was reading Old Andrew’s retrospective, since he’s another teacher who writes about policy (as do Paul Bruno and Harry Webb), and he mentioned that his traffic grew substantially. Andrew stays focused on a few key topics, and really was a go-to blog for OFSTED issues this year (I only vaguely know what OFSTED is, but it’s something English). Well, I’m not really a go-to blog for anything. I’ve definitely written a number of go-to essays, but that’s not the same thing. I’m not focused enough to be a go-to blog for a particular issue. (There it is, fox again.) Given the random nature of my subject matter, I find my traffic levels astounding.

I have been very pleased at the development of the comments section. Several recent posts saw seventy or more comments and some active discussions.

Goals for next year:

• Try to average 6 essays a month.
• Grit my teeth and finish essays that got stalled. I have at least ten draft posts with lots of research that I never get around to completing.
• Review the major topics I write on and set myself some goals to further develop some of the ideas. I am well aware that I haven’t finished my series on Asian immigrants (see the previous bullet), but I never even started some plans I had to write on reform math, and high school curriculum.
• Continue developing some of the strands I started in late November and December on different educational reform philosophies
• Evaluate what the next steps are for getting an even wider reader base.
• Write more under my own name. I did that more through August, but I now have four different essays in draft form.
• Dote upon the granddaughter who will be making her appearance in May. Please tell me I look far too young to be a grandparent.

Hope my new readers will check out the essays below. I refuse to say it’s a fox list. But it’s….eclectic.

Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud	10/08/13	6,663
Philip Dick, Preschool and Schrödinger’s Cat	04/05/13	6,305
The Dark Enlightenment and Me	04/28/13	4,532
Core Meltdown Coming	11/19/13	4,063
Kashawn Campbell	08/26/13	3,631
Homework and grades.	02/06/12	3,380
Algebra and the Pointlessness of The Whole Damn Thing	08/19/12	3,076
The Gap in the GRE	01/28/12	2,964
Why Most of the Low Income “Strivers” are White	03/18/13	2,499
Noahpinion on IQ–or maybe just no knowledge.	10/31/13	2,408
College Admissions, Race, and Unintended Consequences	09/01/13	2,373
Dan Meyer and the Gatekeepers	08/01/13	2,334
SAT Prep for the Ultra-Rich, And Everyone Else	08/17/12	2,293
The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”	07/01/12	2,186
About	01/01/12	1,929
Teacher Quality Pseudofacts, Part II	01/05/12	1,899
Jason Richwine and Goring the Media’s Ox	05/12/13	1,896
Not Why This. Just Why Not That.	11/30/13	1,839
Binomial Multiplication, etc	09/14/12	1,824
The Voldemort View	01/06/12	1,736
An Asian Revelation	06/28/13	1,669
Banging Your Head With a Whiteboard	05/11/12	1,490