…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.
Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:
Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:
The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?
Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.
According to Goodreads, I read 185 books in 2024, comprising a grand total of 81,191 pages, or 221.83 pages per day. That’s assuming I finish Katherine Addison’s The Grief of Stones tonight, which I’m going to, because I have to start reading The Way of Kings tomorrow and I want to be halfway through that big bastard by the end of the day.
(It’s my dad’s birthday tomorrow and we will have family in town. That’s not gonna happen. I’m going to shoot for it regardless.)
With the exception of video games, I went full hermit this year, abandoning nearly all of my hobbies or media consumption except for reading. I have read for half an hour before going to bed at the end of the night for my entire life, and I think I stretched that to an hour this year, and I started reading with my morning coffee on Saturday and Sundays, meaning that my “morning coffee” would regularly last from whenever I got up to lunchtime. So yes, I read a lot faster than most people, but I also spend a whole damn lot of time with a book in my hand. Estimating an eleven-hour-a-week minimum would not be unreasonable at all, and I strongly suspect if I were to ever calculate any such thing it would be more than that.
My average book, by the way, was 439 pages. I actually did hit 200 books one year because I decided to; this year I genuinely wasn’t aiming at any particular number. I bet I could have done 250 if I had selected for shorter books, but I didn’t want to. Only 13 of those 185 books were nonfiction, which is shockingly low even knowing how hard I focused on series fiction this year– I’m shooting for 20% of my books next year being nonfiction, if you didn’t see the update to my reading goals in my previous post.
I read books by 124 authors this year, of which 86 were new to me, which is surprisingly high, especially once we get to how many books by each author I read. Without even looking, I’ll tell you right now that the author I read the most books by is Adrian Tchaikovsky, totaling …
… (looks at Goodreads list) …
Jesus, ten books. Other authors showing up more than once:
Six books: Pierce Brown
Five books: J.R.R. Tolkien, James Tynion IV
Four books: John Gwynne, TJ Klune
Three books: Thiago Abdalla, R.J. Barker, David Dalglish, J.S. Dewes, Robin Hobb, Jay Kristoff, Josh Malerman, Andrea Stewart, Richard Swan
Two books: Susan Abulhawa, Josiah Bancroft, Carissa Broadbent, Shannon Chakraborty, Rin Chupeco, Piper CJ, Rachel Gillig, John Keay, Judy Lin, Vaishnavi Patel, Ava Reid, Samantha Shannon, M.L. Wang
I thought about doing a gender breakdown, but it broke my brain. I have a bunch of authors with initials for first names, and a lot of the time I don’t immediately know those folks’ gender, and then you throw in the enbies and that’s more research than I really want to do. I’m about to show you the whole list anyway, so you can look for yourself if you want. :-). Of the 29 authors I read more than one book by, I’m certain 14 are men and 13 are women and yes, I know that doesn’t add up to 29 and I still might be wrong on a couple of them. For whatever that might be worth.
Pretty covers time? Pretty covers time. Click on ’em for gallery view:
One random thought tonight, as it has been a tremendously sleepy Saturday and I’ve pretty much just been lazing about and reading and playing video games all day and have no thinks left: I have been tremendously enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard, which was a great weight off of my shoulders after quitting partway through the last installment, but at 55 hours in I would very much like to put it to bed now, thanks. I just went through the trophies for the game and there appear to be five or six more story chapters, which just makes me even more tired.
It’s my own fault; if I wasn’t such a blasted completist in this type of game I could probably be done with it by now, and the worst thing is that I know I missed one– and only one– trophy, necessitating an eventual second play through. I was probably going to do that anyway to see how a bunch of different story decisions work when I make them the other way, but now I have to, at least for certain values of “have to” involving being an obsessive dork.
God, it’s good there aren’t any real problems in the world, right?
Every time my kids took a test last year, I went into a depression spiral, because for some reason my test results were consistently worse than all of the other middle school math teachers in my district. My 8th graders took their first real test of the year on Wednesday. And … well.
Blue bar is best bar, there’s no green bars for anybody because the idiot person who put the test together forgot to set a level for Mastery, and red is Bad, and white is untested kids. The person who has 100% of his kids mysteriously untested is also the guy who wrote the test and screwed up the scoring. He also set the schedule for when we were supposed to test! And just … didn’t.
But my blue bar is way bigger than anybody else’s blue bar, including Mr. I Work At the Honors School to my right, and my red bar is smaller than everyone else’s, so suck it.
Can we talk about Algebra’s last test? Sure, let’s, and be aware that this is what both of their tests look like:
The other teacher is the other Algebra teacher at my school, and yes, I’m still mad that I don’t have both Algebra classes any more, and the reason there are only two is that for some reason the high school teachers aren’t using the system that we’re all supposed to use to keep track of student achievement on the tests the high school teachers wrote.
There’s some inside baseball going on here, obviously, and I’m sorry if this is a little incoherent, but I’m really frustrated with the way this system for common assessments is getting implemented at basically every building other than mine. But y’all know how competitive I am and my kids are kicking names and taking ass so far this year. Which is a fucking relief, after last year.
Oh, and grade-wise? Currently I have one hundred and seventy-four students in my six classes (Algebra has 21, and all of my 8th grade classes but one have 31. My “small” 8th grade class has 29.) and of those 174 kids, only 39 (22%) have Ds or Fs. Considering that last year this happened at the beginning of the third quarter I will absolutely take those numbers. I have way more kids getting As than getting Ds or Fs. That hasn’t happened very often.
So yeah. I’m going to enjoy pretending I’m good at my job tonight.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be:
Basically all I did was add the “Is the number a fraction?” step there, and we’ll have to review converting fractions to decimals a bit, but it’ll do and they need to remember how to do that anyway.
In the meantime, I actually called out sick today; my Mounjaro (I assume) got on top of me hard in the last couple of days and I spent less of last night sleeping than I generally like to do, in favor of activities that generally aren’t meant to be described in polite company. So I slept most of the day away once it passed. I may have to have a review day for my kids on Friday already, though, which feels awfully early, although if I remember right we probably had about one a month last year anyway so maybe not. We’ll see how the next couple of days go, assuming I can drag my ass out of bed.
I was thinking about waiting until tomorrow for this one, but unless someone decides to go through all of my posts between now and midnight (Feel welcome! Please do!) I don’t think the next few hours are going to make all that much of a difference to how my traffic looked in 2023. Interestingly, I like how the data is presented on my phone better than I do on the website, but here’s the main piece of data:
Here’s the last year by month:
And here’s year-over-year for the entire life of the site:
For those of you who are unaware, that huge spike in 2015, as well as a big part of the 2016 traffic, was from one post, and I obviously haven’t been able to reach that level of virality with anything since. Being up 14% over last year feels good, though, especially since I wrote less this year than I have … well, basically almost forever:
Does it entertain me that I sent my traffic up by posting less than any year other than 2017? Yes. yes it does. And even those 2017 posts tended to be longer; I only had one year with shorter average posts than this one. Interaction is way down, too, but blogs in general are way less popular than they were in the early 2010s and I have trouble worrying too much about it; while I enjoy looking at my numbers and pretending I have any idea at all what moves traffic one way or another, it’s not why the site is here, and I’d still be writing even if no one was reading at all. I had nearly thirty thousand people at least glance at my stupid little blog this year. That’s insane.
Even more insane:
I don’t have an easy way to quantify this, but that’s considerably more geographical diversity than I have gotten most years on the site. That’s just 2023. Here’s the whole time:
The very short list of places where I have never had blog traffic from: that blob at the top is Svalbard Island, owned by Norway, and I’m not completely convinced that traffic there doesn’t show up as Norway. Svalbard Island is my white whale, I think. North Korea. And then Western Sahara, which I don’t think is actually a country, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Gabon. That’s it, other than maybe some tiny islands that you literally can’t see on the map. Nine places. I can’t even say countries.
That’s absolutely fucking nuts, even knowing full well that the wild majority of those hits were probably both accidental and brief.
Back to the site traffic, though, and the undeniable slowing down of how much I’ve been posting here: I hate to admit it, but the main reason I’ve been posting less is that I’ve been happy lately, more or less. And being generally content does not lead to blog posts. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, I think (this, the third post of the day, represents the final snowflake of your promised flurry) but I’ve been in a pretty good place for most of the last two years, and there are just more days where I don’t happen to feel like I have something I need to hash out or complain about or get off my chest so I don’t inflict it on my family. Plus, hell, y’all got nearly 80K words out of me on a down year, so it’s not like anyone’s going to complain.
So yeah. I’d like to pretend I’ll be asleep by midnight, but I won’t, if only because being on break has shoved me more toward nocturnal than I’ve been lately and I will probably be up and reading at midnight. We aren’t doing anything, though. Too old for that shit. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, briefly luxuriate in the thought that I have been asleep for 99% of the year, and then find something to do with myself. Don’t do anything too dumb tonight.
I got my evaluation back from my assistant principal today. We don’t really need to go into the details of how our evaluation system works; suffice it to say that my final score was 3.88/4, which is the highest final score I’ve ever received, and my third or fourth year in a row at Highly Effective. I will probably never manage a perfect score for various reasons so only losing twelve hundredths of a point over the course of the four classroom observations and two official goals is pretty damn good.
I also spent parts of sixth and seventh hour crunching NWEA data. I’ve talked about the NWEA before; it’s one of the standardized tests I at least kinda like– it’s over fast, it’s given multiple times a year (but still eats a lot less time than the single administration of the ILEARN does) and it focuses on measuring individual student growth and doesn’t bother with a pass/fail cutscore. It also does this thing where everybody is measured on the same scale– it goes up to like 350 or something like that but a 230 or so is about what an 8th grader is expected to get on the Math test at the beginning of the year, where a first grader might be shooting for a 180 and a high school senior a 270. Two of those numbers are made up but you get the basic idea.
Long story short, my numbers were phenomenal. I got an average of a year’s growth out of these kids between the test that was administered the week before I got there and the one I gave them a couple of weeks ago– a year’s worth of growth in basically one semester. My two Honors classes in particular posted huge gains. This is probably getting too far into the weeds, but check this out:
This is my first hour class. The plus signs are Math and the squares are LA. Now, you’d expect everybody to be to the right on the “achievement” part of the graph, since they’re honors kids, but there’s nothing about honors classes that guarantees high growth, and compare how high the pluses are to how high the squares are. It’s even more stark in sixth hour:
Only four kids from that group didn’t manage high growth. That’s outstanding. And by comparing my kids to their ownLA scores I know I’m not running into any statistical bullshittery; they flat-out improved more in Math than they did in LA, and by a pretty good margin once you pull all the numbers together. That’s as clear a teacher effect as I know how to demonstrate.
“But wait, Mr. Siler!” you might point out. “Didn’t your kids have a month with no teacher, and therefore possibly score more poorly on the second administration than they might otherwise, thus leading to high growth as they get back what they lost?”
A reasonable question, and while I’m not going to post the graphs, I also looked at how they did against the first test of the year, when a missing teacher wasn’t a problem, and the gains are still as stark. My other classes don’t look quite this good– again, the honors kids really came through for me– but they still look pretty goddamn good.
I may just have my mojo back, y’all.
Remind me of this post in three days, when I’m drained by the last week and never want to teach again. 🙂
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 