I'd always thought it would be a tad surreal to win an Academy Award, or an Olympic gold medal, or some such spectacular trophy for all-around splendiferousness. Surreal because of the rush of adrenaline that comes from all the admiration, knowing you are appreciated - but also knowing that you better get off your duff and do something else so that you don't seem like a flash in the pan.
It's even more surreal, I can now say, to receive a lovely award for which you didn't know you were being considered, and in fact didn't know existed. I fired up my computer this morning to read the following email from Daryl Cobranchi:
Kimberly,
Blog of the Century! Don't get a big head, now. Congrats.
Daryl
Wha? What? Through my blurry and uncaffeinated eyes I stared at the screen. I couldn't figure out what Daryl was talking about. There was an email immediately preceding his with the subject line, "WINNING NOTIFICATION!!!", but even an uncaffeinated hedgehog could've figured out that that was one of those Nigerian-lottery scams. Being not quite as sharp as a hedgehog this morning, I clicked on it, just to be sure:
ATTN;WINNER, We happily announce to you the draws of the Centenary Olympics Big Lottery International programs held on the 25th of OCTOBER 2004 here in Athens, Greece.This promotion takes place every Olympic year You were entered as dependent clients with: Reference Number:NM/BC921245/KY13, and Batch number NM/207161/KOP....
Okay, so it's not that. I went to Daryl's site, and discovered that Education News has declared N2P to be "The BLOG of The Century." They don't say which century; I hope they don't mean the last one:
In Defense of Testing Series
Number 2 Pencil: The BLOG of the Century
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
It seems hard to believe that Kimberly Swygert's BLOG, Number 2 Pencil, approaches its third anniversary. It still seems so new. For those of you unfamiliar, Kimberly is a card-carrying psychometrician who expresses in her BLOG her open, honest, and informed opinions on education policy in general and standardized testing in particular. Before she started, no psychometrician had been willing to do this, in the interest of protecting their careers. We all owe her a debt of gratitude for her courage.
Wow. How flattering. Especially given all of the other edublogs out there (see the list over on the right-hand side of this page if you don't know about them). And they got the timeline right, too - N2P will indeed celebrate its third anniversary in January of 2005. It sounds amazing even to me, especially considering that I thought no one would ever read this blog. Well, I thought maybe some other psychometricians might read it, but no one else.
What a nice way to start the day. A bit surreal, as I said, but nice. Had I known I was in the running for such praise, I would have tried a bit harder and posted a few more testing-related articles, at the expense of a few catblogging posts. But hey! - I made the Carnival of the Cats this week too. So I must be doing well all around.
Now would be a good time ("I'd like to thank the Academy...") to thank those who have provided a great deal of academic, moral, and technical support for N2P, almost since day 1: Joanne Jacobs, Dr. Greg Cizek, Dr. Richard Phelps, John Rosenberg, Dean Esmay, Daryl Cobranchi, and every single one of my Devoted Readers. Without you, this blog would be nothing.
This post will stay at the top of the page for the day; scroll down for new posts.
Posted by kswygert at October 26, 2004 11:37 AM