I spent a chunk of the past weekend listening to the new Taylor Swift album, The Life of A Showgirl, and drafting “a paragraph or two” which according to the online instructions should tell my Harvard Class of 1981 classmates, “what you would like them to know about your activities, interests, family life, career, etc. concentrating on the past five years.” It didn’t take a Harvard grad or even a devoted Swiftie to make the connection between what Taylor Swift does with her albums and what I have done for the past 45 years with these quinquennial submissions to the Harvard Class Report, or “Red Book.” She shares what she wants people to know about what’s been going on in her life with her albums and I do the same with these reports.
I had recently attended my 25th college reunion when Taylor’s eponymous first album, Taylor Swift, was released in 2006, but she is ahead of me with 12 albums to my 9 Red Book submissions. For the longest time, she was on a biennial album release schedule while, as noted above, my life reflections are submitted every five years. Make sense. For the most part, she’s had a lot more going on in her life that people are interested in knowing about than I’ve had in mine. Although I might have given her a run for her money (or at least my money) with the corresponding 5-year period in my mid-30s: new house in a new state, baby daughter, an unexpected family health crisis, starting a new company and career, and trying to equate performance events and portfolios.
Of course, Taylor makes a living sharing her stories, while sharing mine is just a hobby. But still, we’re basically doing the same thing.
Following in her footsteps, it also made sense for me to repurpose my Red Book submission to also serve as this week’s blog post. After all, if Taylor can sell at least a dozen (probably 13) physical versions of the same album to people who stream their music, don’t own a record player, and have no way to listen to a CD then I should be able to use my reflection twice.
It’s a coin flip on whether this post or my Red Book submission will be read by more people, but I’m fairly certain there will be no overlap – even factoring in that I read my own blog posts.
So, what did I choose to share with my classmates.
My Life in One or Two Paragraphs (Expanded Version)
Let’s begin with the most important aspect of my life. As has been true since the beginning, my marriage and family remain, by far, the best outcome of my Harvard experience. Lisa and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary in 2024 – 45 years after our computer-generated “meet-cute” in Memorial Hall while registering for Spring 1979 classes (Lisa’s freshman year, my sophomore year), which eventually led to our first date in the summer of 1980, and the rest is history, as they say. In the past five years, our daughter completed her doctorate, a successful postdoc, and has started her career in academia. All is good.
For me, the past five years have been a time of shaping, shaping my body, and shaping both my personal life and semi-professional life in semi-retirement. Regarding my body, the longstanding goal of fitting into my Harvard Band jacket just one more time before all is said and done remains elusive, but I am nothing if not persistent. As for my personal life, my comfort level emerging from pandemic mode is directly proportional to my success in reshaping my body. I still do not venture out into crowds all too often, but in 2025 I did attend my first two indoor concerts since December 2019. There may even be some air travel in my plans for 2026 – you never know.
Professionally, I now self-identify primarily as a writer, which is something my 22-year-old self graduating from college never would have imagined. Let’s just say, there’s a reason that I chose data over words and music.
It wasn’t until I was working on my M.Ed., and a professor in a Research Methods course at Northeastern University devoted an entire class to a paragraph-by-paragraph guide to writing a research paper that my writing began to border on organized and coherent. While at the University of Minnesota, it was yellow legal pads and nonstop writing, writing, writing, some of which has even managed to see the light of day.
Then early in my career in large-scale testing, I got to live out my childhood Ted Sorensen fantasy of writing words for policymakers and assessment leaders. I had no aspirations to be the president of the United States, a commissioner of education, or even the frontperson for a testing company, but it was fulfilling writing for others, learning their voice, and helping to craft their message.
In the 2010s, the words became my own, not necessarily by choice, but simply because that’s the direction my journey led. And then the writing became intentional and personal.
My blog, Embrace The Absurd, now has a catalog of more than 350 posts and seems to attract a steady daily viewership/readership regardless of whether there is a new post. My first book, Fundamentals and Flaws of Standards-Based Testing: Lessons learned across three decades in educational assessment, was published in May 2025 by Routledge. And the chapter I co-authored for the 5th edition of Educational Measurement, a project that began six years ago, is finally scheduled for publication by the end of 2025. That chapter, Assessment to Inform Teaching and Learning, is a fitting coda to my professional career in large-scale educational testing and brings me full circle back to my roots in classroom assessment.
Connections to the Past, Present, and Future
In one sense, these quinquennial Red Book submissions are connecting my present self to a forty-five year ago time, place, and persons that no longer exists. You cannot go home again. The Class of 1981 is a state of mind.
However, as I wrote in a 2021 post, With a Little Help from the Class of 1981, it has been only over the past 20 years through these submissions and reunions that I “truly made a connection with this remarkable Class of 1981… and [was able] to draw support from them at two critical points in my life.” Going forward, I have no doubt that although most of them remain strangers, I will continue to benefit and learn from the lives lived and stories shared by this collection of 1,600 people bound by a shared experience, tradition, and a red book.
Image by deselect from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 