This Blog’s 9th Birthday

Today is the 9th anniversary of the first post on this blog. It’s been on this site since 2009, but had three years before that in a couple of other places. I don’t know if this makes it the longest running UK blog by a teacher, I suspect that this depends on what kind of break is allowed before you say a blog has ceased to run and how you define “teacher”, but it is definitely one of the oldest.

My regularity in posting has declined this year mainly because inspiration and time have never been consistently available due to the nature of teaching, and after a couple of years of quite dramatic growth in hits, this year has been one of less frequent posting and activity. A lot of that comes down to a greater priority being given this year to blog-related projects outside of the main blog. In particular:

• Taking over as editor for the Labour Teachers blog;
• Contributing to the blog review for Schools Week;
• Researching and wroting a whole chapter in this book;
• Running the Echo Chamber.

The last of these has been the most time-consuming, and I am hoping to make some changes to make it more manageable. Hopefully, then I will have the time to post more regularly on this blog.

Despite the smaller number of posts, there have still been some highlights of blogging this year. I’ll mention a few of them:

• This week’s controversy over green pens and other marking policy nightmares;
• Raising awareness over the education establishment’s take over of the proposed College Of Teaching;
• An analysis of the arguments progressives have jumped on in the last couple of years (Part 1 and Part 2). The second part in particular identified two ludicrous arguments that have now become standard for shutting down debate.
• A guest post about some very misleading research on P4C that was widely publicised;
• Pointing out how wrong phonics denialists were about the accuracy of the phonics screening check;
• A fairly heavy couple of posts about disagreement between traditionalists. (Part 1 and Part 2). Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have sparked the debate I was looking for;
• A summary of the Daily Mail’s hypocrisy on school discipline stories;
• On “just teaching” and in praise of explanations explain my teaching philosophy.

I have no great plans for the next year beyond trying to increase the amount of blogging, but I’m hoping to keep debate going and traditionalist opinions out there. Thanks to all my readers for staying with me, and I hope you stick around to see me complete my first decade of blogging.

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