Out of the Rabbit Hole and into the #SEPreflects Blogging Challenge

“The time has come
The walrus said
To talk of many things:
Of shoes- and ships-
And sealing wax-
Of cabbages and kings-
And why the sea is boiling hot-
And whether pigs have wings.” 


Certainly a nonsensical quote from Lewis Carroll's brilliantly absurd children's story seems to be an odd way to start the first post of a blog about assessment data. But just as my job as Southeast Polk's district assessment coordinator is not just about Data Director, test scores, and spreadsheets, this blog will be about many things besides all of the numbers from the myriad assessments that I lose myself in every day.

“In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” 

It is all too easy for my to lose myself in the rabbit hole that data can create. I've always loved playing with data. As a kid, when my friends sorted their baseball cards based on their favorite teams or players, mine were sorted based on criteria that were based on the hitting and pitching statistics on the back of them. I didn't realize it when I was in elementary school, but I had created a rubric to assess the hitting or pitching skills of each player pictured on the gum-scented pieces of cardboard that I spent most of my allowance on each week. For years, the floorspace of my bedroom was dominated by a grid-like arrangement of baseball cards as I sorted and re-sorted them based on the statistical criteria in which I was most interested at the time. If I would have had access to spreadsheets back in the late seventies, there would have been considerably more hardwood visible in my room. 

My other rabbit hole was reading, which explains how a numbers geek became an English teacher, then a computer technology teacher, and then a data coordinator. In the same way I would become obsessed with baseball stats, I would also become obsessed with certain authors or series of books. Even though I don't read as voraciously now as I did then, a good writer can still hook me, regardless of genre. This is the only explanation I can give for why I've read every Harry Potter book multiple times, why any new Carl Hiaasen novel is always pre-ordered for instant delivery to the Kindle app on my iPad, and why it seems like Christmas when I learn that previously unpublished works of Kurt Vonnegut have become available. 

"Curiouser and curiouser..."

Could there be a better phrase to describe a career in education? Whether I've taught high school or junior high, English or technology, as a classroom teacher or a district coordinator, I've never lacked in things that have surprised me, that created questions that led me down one rabbit hole or another. And as I finish up this first blog post, I'm looking forward to continuing the journey, and to whatever new surprises are part of it.