Spring 1980.

I am sitting in my dorm room of a local junior college looking out the window from the third floor of an ornate but old rock building. On that day, I wrote my first real poem, inspired by e.e. cummings’s “[In just-]” that I had recently read in my speech course with Steve Brannon.

I began playing with letter and word placement while watching students throwing a Frisbee on the dorm lawn, weaving the word “Frisbee” to reveal “free,” “is,” and “be”:

Winter 2023.

This has been my journey across five decades to be a writer. I could have never envisioned as a college student that I would in fact become a writer and that my writer life would primarily be grounded in a WordPress blog.

I start blogging reluctantly at my own blog in 2013, a decade ago. Oddly, 2014 was a peak year until nearly being matched in 2023, which saw almost 219,000 views and about 138,000 visitors.

Over my 22 years in higher education, I have gradually decreased my traditional scholarly work after authoring, co-authoring, editing, or co-editing almost 30 books and dozens of journal articles. Traditional work feels perfomative and hollow, to be honest.

Instead, I prefer public work, activism that has an open-access audience and may better impact how the world of education works.

My social media audience is over 10,000 and my social media traffic is consistent with hundreds of views per day resulting in 10,000-20,000 views per month.

In 2023, for example, my open-access work on grade retention contributed to removing grade retention in Ohio. My primary work on the “science of reading” has maintained an audience with much less satisfying outcomes.

It means a great deal to me to have this space to be a writer, and I appreciate even more my audience of smart, kind, and dedicated folk who often share with me the need to speak up as one avenue of activism.

The top 10 posts of 2023 include the following with links below:

1. Podcast: What You Can Do: How ‘Sold a Story’ sold us a story ft Dr. Paul Thomas
2. Which Is Valid, SOR Story or Scholarly Criticism?: Checking for the “Science” in the “Science of Reading”
3. Open Letter: To Curriculum Coordinators in South Carolina School Districts, Diane Stephens
4. Does the “Science of Reading” Fulfill Social Justice, Equity Goals in Education? (pt. 1)
5. The Myth of the Bad Teacher: 2023
6. Reading Programs Always Fail Students and Teachers
7. Simplistic View of Reading Fails Children, Reading, and Science
8. Open Letter to the Biden Administration, USDOE, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona
9. Fact Checking SCDOE Science of Reading Infographic
10. How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement

While I remain primarily committed to my public work here on this blog, 2023 (and 2022) was a fruitful time for producing traditional scholarship that is open-access; let me share those again here:

• Compton-Lilly, C., Spence, L.K., Thomas, P.L., & Decker, S.L. (2023, November 2). Stories grounded in decades of research: What we truly know about the teaching of reading. The Reading Teacher. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2258
• Thomas, P.L. (2023, September). NEPC review: Teacher prep review: Strengthening elementary reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/teacher-prep
• Thomas, P.L. (2023). The Science of Reading Era: Seeking the “Science” in Yet Another Anti-Teacher Movement. Journal of Reading Recovery, 22(5), 5-17. https://readingrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/JRR_22-2_spring_2023_thomas.pdf
• Thomas, P.L. (2023). The “Science of Reading,” Education Faddism, and the Failure to Honor the Intellectual Lives of All Children: On Deficit Lenses and Ignoring Class and Race Stereotyping. Voices in the Middle, 30(3), 17-21. https://library.ncte.org/journals/vm/issues/v30-3/32439
• Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
• A Critical Examination of Grade Retention as Reading Policy (white paper). Prepared for the Ohio Education Association in response to Ohio’s “Third Grade Reading Guarantee,” September 15, 2022.

Writing is a solitary venture with an urge to speak to a community beyond the Self. Often it is a lonely act, and too often, it feels pointless (we writers are also an anxious bunch prone to depression and such).

And it is now cool to relentless trash all social media.

However, the virtual community I have built over the past decade through the blog and social media is incredible and important.

My existential leanings allow me not just to survive, but thrive.

Remember, the struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a person’s heart. In this struggle, yes, I am happy.

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The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus