This Sunday, I show off the three posts on my website that have had the most visitors overall. I think these three posts have relevance to what’s happening in education, not just day-to-day but over the long haul.
- The most popular post on my blog: Sarah Fine on Leaving Teaching. Sarah Fine wrote a lengthy op-ed piece for the Washington Post on why she was abandoning the teaching profession. My commentary on it has earned over 900 visits since this blog started, and it’s one of my most-linked articles. It got more than a quarter of its total visitors in the first few days after publication, but has seen a consistent trickle all the way through.
- The second most popular post on my blog: The Mountain and Me. How we do big things for our kids, that we only understand in the moment, and rarely fully even then. How challenging this day was, as a teacher. How little it seemed to matter in the long run… until it mattered a lot. Over five hundred visitors to date. Unlike the next post, it got all of its visits in the first three days after publication, and then almost nothing since then.
- Peter Salovey on Emotional Intelligence. I enjoyed this talk by a Yale Professor on the importance of developing a student’s emotional intelligence, and these are my notes on his talk. Why this post has had almost five hundred visitors to date is confusing to me, but there you are. It’s been an important read for a lot of people, apparently, because it generates a consistent number of 30-40 visitors a month for about a year now.
- Learning to Draw the Tree of Life has gotten a steady flow of visitors, about 30-50 a week for two years. It doesn’t appear to be people interested in teaching that are making this visit, though… it’s people from the Western Mystery Tradition (WMT) community that are coming in from elsewhere to make use of this resource. It’s good to blog outside your traditional areas from time to time. This art project is apparently quite useful to them.
- The Final Exam Data was a useful examination of what I learned from following Doug Lemov’s program last spring. I wish I could teach this way reliably. So do my colleagues. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but my colleagues and deans and head of school like to remind me from time to time that this IS the way that middle schoolers often need to be taught. This post had over 200 visitors, mostly in the two weeks right after it was posted, but a slow-drip of 1-2 visitors a week has followed on that.
