Tag Archives: blogiversary

Sixteen Years Ago

Sixteen years ago today, I started this blog. My hope was that I could share my thinking about educational issues and perhaps share some of the curricular and teaching resources I created. I haven’t done much writing about either of these topics in some time, but I long ago decided that rather than feel pressured to blog consistently that I would blog when I was moved to blog. 

I have some recent good news to share with anyone who might not follow me on social media. I’m now Dr. Huff. 

Me and my dissertation committee

I successfully defended my dissertation on June 1. My topic is assessment, which will probably surprise no one who has been following this blog for a long time. In fact, I concluded my dissertation with reflections on how much my exchange with a student changed my thinking about assessment and grading.

I’m excited to see what is next for both me and this blog. Thanks to those of you who have stuck around over the years.

This Blog is a Teenager

thirteen photo
Photo by josephmatthews

As of today, this blog is a teenager. Thirteen years ago today, January 25, 2005, I started blogging at huffenglish.com.  I always post on my blog anniversary, and usually, I share some statistics, but I’m not going to do that today.

Instead, I’m going to ask for your help. If you have found this blog useful, and you want to pay it forward, I support these organizations and would be happy if you would support them, too.

Twelve Years

twelve candles photo
Photo by Pewari

Today this blog is twelve years old. I originally envisioned this blog as a place where I could write about what I was thinking and where I could share my teaching ideas. It hasn’t changed a lot from that vision over the years, though posting has grown less frequent. I have been looking over some of the posts I wrote years ago, and it makes me wish I had a little more time to write—aside from summer, when I seem finally to be able to catch up and write.

I just finished my twentieth year of teaching, and such an important milestone has made me a bit reflective. It’s hard to believe I have been blogging here for more than half of my career now. Sometimes I don’t even feel like I was a teacher before this blog. Perhaps because I wasn’t reflecting or journaling about teaching much until this blog, my memories of my teaching career up until this blog are fuzzier. It’s hard for me to articulate what this space has meant to me over the years. I have said it many times, but I’m not even sure I’d still be teaching if not for this blog because I no longer felt alone, and I was able to share what I was thinking with an audience who cared. Two years ago, when I wrote my tenth anniversary post, I thanked many supportive friends who helped me early on. I’m not sure what more I can add. Thanks to those of you who have been readers, whether for many years or a few days.

For the curious, here are some weird stats:

  • I have written 1,086 posts on this blog. That works out to 90.5 posts a year or 7.5 posts a month.
  • I have received 3,989 comments. That’s about 332 comments a year, almost one per day.
  • I only have statistics for the last five years, but it looks like my best day for visitors was October 1, 2012. I can’t figure out how to drill down into the statistics and find out how many viewers that was.
  • Most of my visitors today were from the United States, although I checked my stats for all time, and it looks like I have had at least one visitor from, well, almost everywhere. See below.
  • The average number of views ranges from a low of 206 per day for this month of June 2017 up to over 1,000 per day in September 2012. I don’t have statistics older than 2012, but five years is long enough to have a fairly good range. I’m not sure if at one time, I had more views than 1,000 per day, but it boggles my mind that so many people were checking into this blog. Thank you!
  • My blog gets the most traffic on Mondays.
  • I have a combined total of 3,145 subscribers from WordPress and email. Thanks, and I hope I made subscribing worth your while. Since Google shut down Google Reader, I haven’t found an RSS reader I like much, despite trying a few, so I am afraid my own blog reading is really haphazard. I used to be so much better at checking other blogs.
  • My most popular post describes how to use TPCASTT to analyze poetry. I didn’t come up with this technique, but somehow, my page is the #1 Google ranking when you search TPCASTT, which likely explains why the post is so popular. Plus it’s a really good tool, and I can’t take credit for it. Thanks to whoever invented it. My students still use it all the time. As of today, the post has had 47,243 views. The most popular posts seem to have remained pretty steady over time. Rounding out the top five (with number of views) are Understanding by Design: Essential Questions (41,856), Interactive Notebooks (33,325), Teaching “A Modest Proposal” (31,836), and Teaching Romeo and Juliet: Part One (29,253). Many of the most popular posts are among the oldest posts.

Statistics

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Ten Years

2439090788_b175f92406_mGuess what today is? Ten years ago today, I wrote my first entry on this blog. I don’t know that I had a notion when I started this blog that I would keep it going this long. I didn’t think about it at all. I just did it.

I had just finished my first year teaching in a private school. I started reading education blogs. At that time, most of the education blogs were written by ed tech folks. Very few classroom teachers were blogging. I am really excited to see that is no longer the case at all. Teachers at all levels are now blogging about teaching, educational issues, their classroom, educational policy, and, yes, educational technology, and it is wonderful that they have that outlet so their voices are heard. Do you remember what it was like before we could hear from teachers like we can today? How many of us used to sit in our classrooms, feeling alone? I know I did, which is part of why I started blogging.

One of the things blogging has helped me do is be more reflective. I admit at first I started blogging so that I could connect with teachers like me. I was feeling pretty isolated, as I mentioned. Over time, it allowed me space to think about the craft of teaching, what I was reading, and what I was teaching in some seriously helpful ways. I can’t even tell you how many friends I have made through this blog. I don’t think I could honestly tally it up. It was such a wonderful feeling to meet up with these friends at conferences and know that I was no longer alone.

Once I started teaching at a school that was more in line with my educational philosophy, I admit that I didn’t write as much here, mainly because I was supported and encouraged at work. It makes such a big difference. But it meant that I didn’t really need to blog in order to connect to others who shared my thinking. One thing I have realized just recently, however, is that this blog is really about the conversation. Sharing ideas. Committing to reflect. I say it like that because getting lazy about reflection gets me into trouble. I need to have some time to think, and the best way I think is through writing.

When I was a relatively new teacher, I remember a teacher I worked with, a well-respected teacher whom everyone loved, spoke out when the superintendent visited our school. She let him know she disagreed with the fact that he was cutting PD and taking some of the management away from the schools. I still remember her saying, “In this county, we have a concept called site-based management.” I thought she was so brave. She wasn’t afraid she’d be fired on the spot, like I would have been if I had spoken. She didn’t care. It was worth speaking out because it was a problem, and he needed to hear about it. Even if he elected not to make changes, he would know he was not supported, and in that county at the school board was elected. I don’t remember that he actually stayed that long with us. In fact, I barely remember him at all. But I do remember my colleague standing up to him, and I have always wanted to be brave like her. She just recently retired after teaching the first grandchild of one of her students, which is quite an achievement.

Over the years, I have spoken out about some topics that concerned me, such as the way we teach writing, or the way we put students off books, or censorship, or standardized testing, or homework, or any one of a variety of educational issues over the last ten years. I have been pushing myself to write more. It’s important for me to sift through my ideas and feelings here. One of the things this blog has helped me do, actually, is to figure out how I feel about educational issues and speak out about them. I need to do more of that than I have done in the last few years.

Something I heard last week at a conference has resonated with me. I mentioned it before when I wrote about the conference, but now I’m seeing new applications. Rosetta Lee, one of the speakers at the conference, was speaking in the context of how we can be good allies. She said that when allies are silent, she can’t tell if they are silent because they agree with the comments or treatment that others received or if they disagree, but are afraid to say something. I have been thinking about that comment for a week now because it has so many applications. If we are silent about anything that is important to us, no one can tell what we are thinking. And sometimes that kind of thing is important to share. It might help someone. It might encourage someone. It might teach someone. But most importantly, it helps us because our voices are heard. Teachers need to continue to speak out about educational issues. I really do think it’s making a difference. Maybe not as quickly as we would like. But if we don’t speak out and share our ideas, how quickly would things change?

We have a voice. We have the opportunity. I know you’ve probably heard like I have that the blog is dead. I don’t believe that. It’s easier than ever to start. If you haven’t started a blog yet, I challenge you to do so. If you have one, but you haven’t written in a while, or you’ve abandoned it, or you feel like you don’t have a lot to say, so you just don’t post a lot, I challenge you to resurrect your blog. It’s not easy to start. At first, not many people are reading, and it can be frustrating to feel like you’re talking to an empty room. But people will start reading. In fact, leave a comment and link to your blog here, and we’ll support each other.

At the risk of sounding like a cheesy acceptance speech, I do want to thank a few people for their support of this blog. I want to thank Robert Talbert, who left the first ever comment on my blog and has supported me ever since. I think that comment may have disappeared when I had to migrate my blog from Movable Type to WordPress, as I can’t find it now, but I remember it. I also want to thank Glenda Funk, for pushing me to write and for commenting often. I am not as good as she is about supporting my friends. I want to thank Grant Wiggins for supporting the efforts of the UbD Educators in trying to create a wiki. It hasn’t really turned out like I wanted (which was no surprise to Grant, when I told him), but he didn’t have to support it. I appreciated that he did. I want to thank all the teachers near and far, who have come along over the years and supported this blog. I am afraid there are too many to list, and I am deathly afraid I’d leave someone out and hurt someone’s feelings, but it would be wrong of me not to mention several folks by name: Clix, who made so much effort to help me get the wiki off the ground; Nancy, who has been a long-time reader, commenter, and now a friend; Mike LoMonico, who brought me into the Folger fold; Bud Hunt, who gave me some personal attention when I changed fields (back in English again, though, Bud!); Peter B-G, who is now a more local friend and has supported me by coming to my sessions at conferences; Buffy Hamilton, BEST LIBRARIAN EVER; Megan Hayes-Golding, who made friends with me at the first ever EduBloggerCon (I forget what they are calling it now, but it was nice not to feel alone in that room full of super techy folks when I was a new blogger). There are a lot of people who contributed to making me feel like I was worth listening to, and I appreciate you all very much.

Image: René Schäfer.

Nine Years of Blogging

nine birthday photo

I first posted to this blog nine years ago today. My first post, in case you are interested, was a review of Constance Weaver’s book Teaching Grammar in Context. It’s not the most comprehensive or reflective review. I actually re-read a few of my early posts and cringed a little. I like to think I became much more reflective over time, and this blog is a big reason why.

If I had not started this blog, I sometimes wonder if I’d still be teaching. I was in a frustrating position as a teacher for a very long period of my career. I learned a lot. One thing I learned is that there were people out there, people with whom I connected over this blog or their blog or later, Twitter, and they were going through some of the same difficulties, and they shared some of my opinions. It meant so much to have a source of validation. It can be so hard to teach on your own. It took me a long time to realize I was just not teaching in the right place. I’m so thankful that I am teaching in the right place now. However, I wonder—if I had not had this blog and the connections I made starting here, would I have been able to stick it out, or would I have made the assumption teaching wasn’t right for me rather than that I was just in the wrong place?

So I am grateful for my blog because it is the first step I took into being connected to other educators, and it helped me find my voice, and figure out what I believed. I have not always been the most prolific blogger, and I know I don’t post often, but it means a lot to me that this space is always here for me.

I’m also grateful to my blog for helping me reflect. Having an audience and space to talk about what I was reading, doing, and thinking really helped me grow as an educator. I felt myself becoming a better teacher as I began blogging. I taught for about six years before I started blogging, but it was after I started blogging that I became interested in integrating technology. I would never have thought, when I started teaching, that I would ever be “tech savvy.” I certainly didn’t think I’d ever have a real website or anything.

Finally, I’m grateful for you, those of you who have read and sometimes commented. It helped me to know you were out there, somewhere, and that we could talk about whatever was on our minds, read books together, and share ideas.

Photo by LifeSupercharger

Do You Know What Today Is?

Birthday CakeIt is huffenglish.com’s 8th birthday! To make it even more special, I’m celebrating by writing this post in the Blogger’s Cafe at ISTE!

Of course, a cursory glance at my content for the last year or so reveals very little actual blogging.

Why is that? Well, I moved 1,000 miles away and started a new job. I now work at Worcester Academy, and this summer I begin my second year as their Technology Integration Specialist. I can’t think of a more wonderful place to work. They value my professional development enough to send me to the premier educational technology conference in the world, and I work with some truly amazing educators.

I have been really dissatisfied with the quiet on this blog. Even though I made some major changes in my professional and personal life over the last year, and I gave myself permission to let the blog go for a while, I have always maintained that people make time for things they consider important. People used to ask me how I had time to blog, tweet, etc. You know, all the social media. I said I made time to do it because it was important to me. And it is still important to me, but clearly not as important as some other things going on. I am announcing today that blogging has once again moved to my front burner, and if it’s not on the very front burner, at least it’s on the stove again. It’s been relegated to the recesses of the freezer as I tried to acclimate to my new home and job, but because blogging is important to me, I’ll be making time for it again.

Why is blogging important to me? It allows me to reflect on what I’m thinking and learning. Sure, I can do that offline in any one of a variety of note-taking apps I use or even with a pen and notebook, but the kind of thinking and reflection I do here on this blog transformed me as a teacher. Eight years ago, when I started this blog, I was an English teacher, and I had no idea technology integration specialists even existed, much less did I dream of ever being one. I assumed I would spend the rest of my career as an English teacher in Georgia. I am still teaching one English class, by the way, but who could have imagined I would be helping teachers integrate technology in Massachusetts? I didn’t even like technology when I started teaching, and I certainly didn’t think I was any good with it. Now I teach others how to use it in their lessons. Is that crazy?

You really never know what trajectory your career is going to take, and it is smart to make connections with really smart educators online and off, to participate in chats with other teachers when you can, and to tap all those great resources online and in your community. You just never know where your life will take you, and even if you plan it, opportunities will arise that you never foresaw, and doors will close where you expected them to be open.

I am the happiest I have ever been in my life right now, and a lot of that happiness has to do with my professional satisfaction. But only a few years ago, I felt like I was at a professional nadir, and my dissatisfaction at work made it hard to enjoy everything else. It is really true that if you find something you love to do, you really don’t ever work again.

Here is hoping you can find what makes you happy, too.

Happy birthday, huffenglish.com. To many more years of blogging! (And I mean real blogging.) Cheers!