First Anniversary!

Speaking of looking back.....

Today is the last day of the first year of the Teaching Your Middle Schooler blog.  When I started this blog on September 7, 2010 (with that memorable post of  Are Bella and Edward LITERALLY Warping Your Adolescent's Brain?,  foreshadowing a much more famous debate on this issue in the New York Times),  my motivation to actually do it (as opposed to however many years I had been TALKING about doing it) was that I wanted my son to start a blog as a means of getting him to write regularly, and I didn't think I should ask him to do it if I weren't willing to do it myself.

However, I had another goal for myself.  I really wanted to see if I could go for an entire year and actually write something on my blog every day for all 365 days.   And I'm glad to say that I did it!  Even over holidays and long field trip days and hurricane days and vacation days, I managed to post something every day for the past year.  In fact, it turns out that tonight's is my 391st post, so for a number of days, I even managed to post twice!

Perhaps even more exciting than the fact I actually did what I set out to do is the fact that so many of you all were willing to check out what I had to say.  As of tonight, we have had 17,257 page views from people outside our household, which I think is incredible.  I don't know how many unique visitors that is, but it has to be a bunch more than I ever thought would be interested in what I had to say.  Just over one quarter of those were from other countries, which I found really wonderful.  Again, I don't have a count of how many different countries visited my blog, but I know it was a bunch.  Yes, the biggest numbers have come from other English-speaking countries (UK, Canada, and Australia), but we've had visitors from every continent except Antarctica, and all sorts of different countries--big ones, small ones, technology-advanced ones, and technology-deprived ones.  I've had visitors from countries that I had to look up because I didn't know where they were, and I'm NOT one of those geography-deprived Americans who don't know where anything is.

So it has been thrilling to see the visits, and, really, an honor to share my thoughts with you all.  Thank you so much for coming and checking me out.

I also have to acknowledge my 12 year old son, who has also really stuck to his blog.  He never had a personal goal to write every day, but did most days, and has accumulated 369 posts.  So, to use one of his favorite expressions, Huzzah for him!

So I may not be quite so obsessed about writing every day this year as I was for the last one.  But I will continue to share my thoughts, resources, lesson plans, curriculum links, and opinions about education as it relates to our (roughly) 11-14 year olds.

So I hope you all will continue to visit as we launch into Year 2.