Post #5000

I try not to get all meta around here, but this is post #5000 at the mother ship of the Curmudgucation Institute, so I'm going to take moment to savor the sheer bulk that we've added to the interwebs.

First post went up on August 16 or 2013. I recommend that you do not go back and look at the early posts from what is best described as the "What exactly the hell do I do with this thing" period of my blogging. It took my a while to hit my stride. 

While this has been the main outlet for my education writing over the years, I've appeared other places as well, including a year at EdWeek, writing for The Progressive, Forbes.com, the Bucks County Beacon, some HuffPost years. I've also been writing a weekly column for the local newspaper about pretty much anything for 26 years. I have occasionally started other related projects, but those have been interrupted by life.

My big debt is to the people who put me out in front of an audience. I have some writerly instincts, but absolutely lack the self-promotion gene. Diane Ravich, Anthony Cody, Nancv Flanagan, Valerie Strauss, Jeff Bryant, a couple of guys who wouldn't necessarily want to be associated directly with me, and a host of other people who shared my stuff and passed it along have amplified the work. And that's before we even get to all the folks who have provided various forms of support all along the way, all the way back to the folks who gently suggested I rethink my original idea that the blog would look cool if it were white text on a black background. 

The single most common question I get is about how I do so much writing. The answer comes in a few parts.

1) There are plenty of people who write as much as I do. Diane Ravich passed the 5000 post mark roughly an hour and a half after she started blogging. Other folks spend lots of time polishing and crafting and that amounts to a huge quantity of writing, even if the end result just one published piece.

2) Low standards. When I started the newspaper column, I learned really quickly that I could not create a shining masterpiece every seven days, and I could either meet deadlines or settle for workable pieces that got the job done even if they weren't necessarily destined for immortality. 

3) Read a lot. An awful lot of what I have written is a means of processing or reacting to what someone else has put out in the world. It is always extra rewarding when someone continues that conversation. 

4) I gotta. As with many lines of work (including teaching), there is an itch that only doing the work scratches. I read about stuff, then think about stuff, and the next natural step for me is to write about stuff.

Google's counter, which is hugely suspect, says that there have been 12.5 million or so reads on this blog, plus however many read the substack version, plus whatever reads come to the other outlets. So some hunk of what I've written has touched a nerve or been useful to folks, and that's as much as I could have hoped for. 

I am fortunate and blessed to have done this as long as I have, and I write this sort of post not too often because this work is not about me, but about the work of public education. It's some of the most human and valuable work we do, helping young humans to become their best selves and to understand what it means to be fully human in the world. It is not easy work, and it exists at the intersection of a thousand thousand concerns and interests and tensions between so many different poles. It is one of our greatest experiments as a country, and it will never be complete, never arrive at a moment when we can collectively say, "Okay, that's it. Just lock everything down right here and don't touch a thing." Which means we will always need to keep talking about it, keep arguing for our vision of it, keep pulling and adjusting and balancing and correcting. And as long as that conversation is going on, I'll be adding my two cents.