I had two exams this week which bought the first semester to an end. Woohoo! Asides from finally being on holiday, I’m now officially halfway through the one year through my teaching qualification. I’m hoping the next semester won’t be as nutty as this one, but given that I’ll be studying all the learning areas in the New Zealand curriculum that aren’t English and Maths with a paper on Maori educational practice thrown in perhaps not.
However I’m not going to start worrying about next semester right now. Instead I’ll put my feet up with a slice of cake and enjoy the moment because really birthdays, mothers day, Christmas or just about any day should be an excuse to devour baked goods. Getting to the halfway mark in a demanding course seems like a good reasason to partake in a double decker Red Velvet and Double Chocolate Devil’s foodcake extravaganza. Don’t worry I had some help in consumption of said cake. Since I can’t share my cake with you dear readers I shall give you some bytes to count from my blog. Perhaps not as delicious but still interesting.
Posts: 74 (quite a few still sitting in draft!). My first post was back on January 20 gaining about 20 views.
Comments: 164
Page Loads: 5,600 (32 a day).
Most of my visitors are from New Zealand, which isn’t surprising considering I live there! The country origin of visitor to this site in order are United States, Australia, the UK and Canada.*
Biggest day: June 16th, a combination of posting my popular posts and the twitterverse getting hold of my blog. On the same day the Graduating Teacher Standards E-portfolio received a spike in traffic after @fionagrant promoted (thanks Fiona) and the Twitter will change your life your post generated a large number of retweets.
Most commented on post: Twitter will change your life. Although Should students call teachers by their first name?, Charging student teachers for placements? and Don’t bully me resulted in healthy discussion.
Top 5 most popular posts (in order of popularity)
- Twitter will change your life (254 views)
- Should students call teachers by their first name? (214 views)
- Graduating Teacher Standards E-portfolio (129 views)
- Guidelines for student teacher bloggers (120 views)
- Teaching: Is being a ‘top graduate’ good enough to be in front of our most vulnerable kids? (102 views)
- Teaching experience number 2, a year 1 and year 2 placement, starts on the first day of term 3.
- My first unconference, the Auckland Educamp is coming up.
- I have a few meltdowns into misery as my course covers the rest of the New Zealand curriculum in one semester.
- Operation ‘job search’ moves into full swing.
Teaching the Teacher 
Definitely very James Bondish! Love the cake – you multi-talented, multi-tasker you!! 🙂
Congratulations on the first half of the year – the second half will go very quickly. (Loved all the stats too – right up my alley at the moment lol)
Justine
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Most of my friends and family think I missed my calling, I should have trained to do food tech/home economics! I find wordpress a lot better in the site stats department than blogger, but I admit it’s been a few years since I’ve used blogger.
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Love your post and the cake! Looks decadent. Love the stats as well, really interesting to do such an analysis. I don’t know how you fit everything into a one year course. You have my admiration and I will be hoping for the very best for you for the second half of the year.
Kathryn
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Thanks for your kind words Kathryn. I feel fortunate that I majored in Education during my undergraduate degree so what I’m studying isn’t entirely foreign to me, in terms of learning theory and educational policy. However in other areas it has been a rather steep learning curve.
I think the stats would be good for someone looking to build a blog as you can see where your readership comes from and what generates discussion.
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