A Thank You to My Readers: 1 Million Strong Today

Today this blog attracted its one millionth reader according to the little counter that Blogger provides to users of their service. While this number is dwarfed by many of the great education bloggers out there, it still marks a big milestone for me. I started this blog in earnest five years ago after some fits and starts. It fulfills a promise I made to myself to write after my retirement, because I felt I still had some things to say about teaching literacy. Over time I also began to address teaching and the politics of public education from a broader perspective.

One million is a mind boggling number. I have been presenting workshops for teachers since the early 1980s and in all that time I have probably reached fewer than 5000 teachers. With this blog I reach that many every week. Amazing.

So thank you to all my readers. I appreciate every single person who has ever clicked on this blog and I hope you have found thoughtful and useful information here. A special thank you to some folks who have championed this blog throughout its run: Diane Ravitch, Dr. Mary Howard, Peter Greene, P.L. Thomas, Steven Singer, Stu Bloom, Jonathan Pelto, Julie  Larrea Borst, and Susan DuFresne. Thanks also to Denny Taylor and Garn Press for reposting my work on the Garn Press web site. Special thanks to friends Erica Spence-Umstead, Tom Barclay, Don Stoll, Darcie Cimarusti, and Carol Burris for continued encouragement. Finally thanks to my wife Cindy, my number one confidant, critic, and co-conspirator.

As a form of celebration, here are five posts, one from each of the five years of the blog's existence, that I think represent what the blog has been all about.

From 2013: Round Robin Reading Must Die - One person's effort to wipe out a ubiquitous, but failed, literacy practice.

From 2014: Fighting Back at Standardized Tests: A Teacher's Guide- What the classroom teacher can do to fight back at the proliferation and abuse of standardized tests.

From 2015: You've Got To Be Taught - One teacher's take on racism, how it is taught in this country, and how it can be untaught in our schools by knowledgeable, caring teachers.

From 2016: 10 Reading Instruction Non-Negotiables - What are the most essential elements of reading instruction?

From 2017: What Kind of Knowledge Does a Teacher Need? - While it is important for teachers to have broad and deep content knowledge, even more important is the knowledge of how to communicate that knowledge to students - pedagogical content knowledge.

Enjoy! And as Shakespeare would say, "Thanks and thanks; and ever thanks.