Spring Blog Cleaning – Plus an Image Quiz

In 17 years, this blog has accumulated quite a lot of “stuff.”

Blogging a bunch

I started writing in 2006. There was lots of union stuff, and math teaching and math puzzles, and some travel, and movies, and… well, a lot. And in 2007 I posted over 400 times. In 2008 and 2009 almost as much. I was getting some attention – from math education and puzzle people, from UFT people. The Manhattan Users Guide wrote a blurb about me. Some of my content got debated. My guide to Bronx high schools to avoid got lots of attention.

Petering Out

In 2010 my posting fell off – two reasons. First, as a co-coordinator of a UFT caucus I did not want my blog voice to contradict the caucus. And second, my involvement publicizing the abuse of teachers in Bronx Science led me to receive indirect threats that I could face discipline over my blogging; this did not stop me from writing, but did make me cautious, in a way that slowed down my writing. From 2012 – 2016 I was writing maybe 30 – 70 times a year. And in 2017, 18 and 19 – combined – there were 41 posts – barely one per month. If I couldn’t write, the thought occurred to me more than once, maybe I should formally shut it down.

Honestly, I shouldn’t have been scared by the implicit threats. And by the beginning of 2019 I had stopped working with New Action. But I was still barely posting. And that’s where I was when 2020 rolled around.

I’m back

Then the pandemic hit. Which gave me time. And motivated me to write. I was writing things that others were not. About policy – Mulgrew supporting Cuomo against de Blasio. The DoE not having a clue. About safety. About reopening. About scheduling a school. I was very busy in the first few months of COVID, and then a bit less, but this blog was breathing again. Another surge of writing around the UFT election. And again around the battle in the New York City Council, with the UFT leadership on one side, and the retirees on the other.

The Future?

I’m retired, but I’d like to keep involved with the union, and with union politics. And writing about those things. I have not gotten back to writing about mathematics and teaching math and puzzles, but that’s on my mind. And other things. Big Politics. Travel.

Now? Some cleaning

Through the years, I developed quite a blog roll. That’s the list on the right side, below the list of current posts. Those are blogs (and other websites) that you can click to right from here. Now, some blog rolls are quite selective. I once had a blogger write about the selective blog rolls, and the other kind, the kitchen sink blog rolls. I was his example of the kitchen sink.

Not only was my blog roll bloated, but it was, well, old. I hadn’t really maintained it since 2012. Actually, not sure I didn’t any real maintenance since 2007. In any case, this week I found the controls, and I dug in. There were pages that no longer existed. There were blogs that had been removed by their owners. There were pages that were now private. Several pages – the domains were now for sale. Others had been purchased – a gambling site, some sort of scam site… And there were quite a few that had not been updated since 2009.

So I removed the clearly dead, missing, and deleted blogs. I deleted most of those that had gone long without updates. But I didn’t prune for “relatedness” or anything like. I cut more than half, and it’s still badly bloated. 65 links. There needs to be a lot more pruning.

One link I added was for Retiree Advocate / UFT, a caucus I have recently gotten involved with. There’s a little bit to read there – take a look: Retiree Advocate.

Image Quiz

• What is this?
• Where was it taken?
• Bonus point: anything particularly interesting about it? Think trivia.

And, should I keep it? I have better photos, but this one has been there for so long…