The Third Birthday Challenge

Today this blog celebrates its third birthday – three years since the very first post on 1st April 2018. Over the past three years I’ve celebrated the anniversary in the form of a short post: in 2019 I mentioned how my blog had survived when the majority of others fail in the first twelve months, and in 2020 I outlined just how much I was surprised that the blog had made it to twenty-four months.

So, here are in 2021, a full year after the first lock-down in the UK was announced. Rather than write-up the usual celebratory post, I thought I would attempt something different. Having had a think about how the blog needed an update and tidy-up I have decided on a personal challenge: a whole month of posting every single day.

This “month of posts” is to take me throughout the entirety of April, and during the course of this I hope to:

• Upload lingering post ideas that I have had over the past three years, ranging from locations I have visited to micronations and classroom experiences.

• Do a spring-clean of old tags and categories.

• Update old posts in terms of typos and other errors.

• Review some of the old series in terms of future suitability (I’m looking at you “War World Cup” series).

Also, I hope that this month of posts will push me to not only complete the backlog of drafts but also to become more reflective with the type of teacher that I currently am, as well as the teacher that I still hope to be. The past year of lock-downs and disrupted education has made me re-consider how I could teach content and how I could scaffold different skills in the classroom. It would be great if I could pose more of these ideas on the blog in the future.

So, here is to three years! As it stands, I have confidence that the blog will survive to four years in 2022. But first this challenge awaits me. A month of posts starts here.