You Never Know (Top Ten Posts From 2010)

New Year's Eve is my least favorite holiday, mainly because I'm a lifelong early riser and staying up past midnight screws me up for several days thereafter. That said, I like the idea of celebrating the new year, being a natural time to reflect, to take stock, and then get on with your life of doing. So without further ado, I'll get on with what all the cool kids are doing and take a look at my first full Gregorian calendar year as a blogger.

Here are the posts you read the most this year, followed by a few statistical details about Teacher Tom's blogging year that I, at least, found interesting.

1.  Pendulum Painting!

2.  Ghost Mud

3.  Our Own Water Wall

4.  Boy Art

5.  The Importance Of Making Cool Stuff

6.  The Sound Garden

7.  "You And Your Friends Agreed . . ."

8.  Fly Swatter Painting!

9.  Tree Blocks

10.  Drinking Straws

The blog saw a 1001.23 percent increase in readership in 2010, perhaps not particularly impressive given that I was only at it for the last 6 months in 2009, the comparison period, but still it feels good to look back and see the last year has been a time of growth. Nearly 100,000 visitors dropped by the site, viewing nearly 200,000 pages in the process.

Most of you live in the U.S., but one of the beauty parts of the internet is that geography is no longer a factor, although language continues to be. The top ten Teacher Tom reading nations in 2010 were:

1. U.S.
2. Australia
3. Canada
4. United Kingdom
5. Singapore
6. New Zealand
7. Italy
8. Germany
9. Philippines
10. India

And, of course, it's only natural that my home town (Seattle) was number one when it came to breaking it down by cities, but Australia lead the way with 4 of the top 10:

1. Seattle
2. Melbourne
3. Sydney
4. London
5. Silver Spring (MD)
6. New York
7. Austin (TX)
8. Perth
9. Chicago
10. Brisbane

Most of the other statistics are even more navel-gazingly boring than these, although I was interested in the top "key words" typed into search engines to find the blog. If you exclude all the versions of "Teacher Tom," or "Teacher Tom's blog," the top searches are:

1. preschool water wall
2. reflection of a preschool teacher
3. sea otter lyrics chris david

Now I get how the "water wall" search takes people to Teacher Tom because I wrote a couple posts on the topic, and "reflection of a preschool teacher" makes sense because the tag line at the top of the blog used to read "Reflections on teaching and learning from preschoolers," but since the folks who used that search term only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site it tells me they are deeply disappointed. "Sea otter lyrics chris david," however seems odd, even though I know what these people are after: we sing a song in class called "Sea Otter" and I learned it from Chris David, my own daughter's preschool teacher. The sad part is I've never written a post that includes those lyrics, meaning that 255 of you have clicked away empty handed. I suppose I ought to be writing a post that includes those lyrics in the new year.

But the oddest thing of all . . . Several times a week, someone finds my blog with some version of the search term "J. William Oldenburg," and if you add them all together it amounts to one of the top ten searches used to find Teacher Tom in 2010. I tried it on Google myself, and sure enough, my post entitled "The Blueberry Story" from back in July of 2009 is at the top of the list with a "star" no less. Mr. Oldenburg, who I'm not saying is guilty of anything, is obviously still out there being charming.

It just goes to show, you never know. Blogging is a strange and wonderful thing.

Happy New Year!