There is no question that 2024 was a year in which absurdity reigned supreme in so many ways, but today I’m focusing only on the year that was for this blog, Embrace The Absurd.
And what an absurd year it was for my little blog.
2024 marked the fifth year since the blog became my vocation and avocation, and ten years since its soft launch late in 2014. By all metrics, 2024 was the blog’s best year, exceeding its previous annual high for views by more than 30%. But,…
After 300+ posts on the wide variety of topics that have struck my fancy, 2024 was the year that the blog became more yours than mine.
Fewer than half of the views over the past year were of posts that I published in 2024. Three of my top five most-viewed posts in 2024 were from previous years.
Fittingly perhaps, most-viewed was a 2021 post about two of my favorites, Barry Manilow and Taylor Swift. After a little digging, we discovered that my post was picked up by a Barry Manilow fan club and spread across Fanilows on Facebook.
The other two more education-related posts covered topics that I no doubt will be writing about again in 2025: competency-based education and NAEP.
My 2023 post, It’s Time We Talk About Seat Time, in which I attempted to dig beneath the surface of the opposition to the dreaded term “seat time,” had a steady stream of views throughout the year. As we continue to move in the direction of competencies and personalization, it will be critical to understand how and why “seat time” became “seat time” in the first place so that we can avoid heading down that same pathway again. (see Santayana)
And then there was my 2019 post, Is NAEP The Gold Standard?, which is now my most-viewed, non-Taylor Swift-related post of all-time. Frankly, I have no idea why. It’s simply one of several posts I’ve written over the years expressing my always confounding and sometimes frustrating love-hate relationship with NAEP, its trend line, its pseudo-vertical scale, and the length of time it takes to report results. I’m sure there’s a substantial degree of envy mixed in there; perhaps I’ll have a breakthrough when the 2024 NAEP results are released later this month.
Rounding out the top five were two posts written in 2024 about the consternation over goings on with achievement standards on two state tests. The first, Oklahoma – a testing program that has rarely been on my radar across 35 years in state testing. The second, Massachusetts and MCAS – the testing program that has never been far from the center of my assessment universe since the first RFP was issued in 1994.
One thing that the two very different state situations had in common was thorough confusion and a disturbing level of misinformation or at least misinterpretation in how the stories were communicated to and picked up by the general public and those running in assessment social media circles.
Time-ly Issues for 2025
At the other end of the spectrum reside my two least-viewed posts published in 2024.
The first from April, A Chronic Problem, uses the issue of chronic absenteeism as a jumping off point to a discussion of the dearth of relevant, real-time data from schools and the classroom. It ends with the hope/prediction that through advances in technology such data will soon become much more readily available.
So, it’s probably a good idea to start talking about what we would like to do with real-time data when we have it. Be careful what you wish for.
The second from February, 25% More, at its core was also related to time and the need to figure out what to do with more data, information, or content than we can handle. It started with the simple fact that with 2026 approaching, there is 25% more United States history to sift through and synthesize than there was when I took a high school US History course during the Bicentennial year of 1976. And more literature has been published, more science has been discovered, more songs written and paintings painted, etc. That’s without even considering increases due to consideration of multiple and varied perspectives. Sure, we’ve also tossed aside some “history,” books, and ideas that are no longer relevant, but in the end there’s still a significant net increase.
In short, there is too much data and not enough time. Too much to squeeze into a 180-day school year, or even a 200-day school year. Too much to structure schools and teach the way that we have done for too long. We need to make choices. It’s time for a change.
Time, and our lack of understanding of its relationship to learning, was also the topic of the 2024 NCME paper that I wrote with Damian Betebenner, The Time Trap: Why it’s misguided to report assessment results as “years of learning”
I’m not sure what I will end up writing about in the blog as we move week by week through 2025. I have no doubt, however, that the context of many of the issues that emerge in the coming year will involve time, because as much as we might wish to deny it, time and what we do with it is at the heart of every issue related to instruction, learning, assessment, accountability, etc., etc., etc.
And after 2024 I’m even less sure about what posts you will be reading in 2025 (except for that NAEP post), because although I’ve written the posts, it’s a new era for Embrace The Absurd and the story isn’t mine anymore.
Embrace the Absurd 