Well, this is the time that, every year, I list my top ten posts of the year. In light blogging years, I’ve limited myself to the top five.

But this year, I only posted three times. This post will be the fourth, so even a top five list will be difficult.

So let me review the three posts I did manage this year, followed by the usual excuses, pledges to do better in the future, etc.

I started with my annual January 1 Blog Birthday post. I’ll probably do one again tomorrow. This one is full of promises to be a better blogger, promises that ring especially hollow looking back on it a year later.

Later in January, I posted a video I created for an online Shakespeare event. This was meant to replace a real-life Shakespeare event I used to attend back when attending events was a thing. In the video, I splice together two speeches from the same character at different points in his life, taken from two different plays.

Jump ahead to November 1. I posted a challenge I hoped would go viral, inviting visitors to cast a Shakespeare play using only the cast of one movie. I did a couple myself. It was fun. Feel free to give it a try.

So those were my three posts for the year, and this one will make four. So, what happened? Well, honestly, I personally had a truly lousy year, and if I were looking for an excuse for not writing, I wouldn’t have to look much past that. However, the real reason I haven’t been blogging is a lot simpler and a lot more positive.

This year, I embarked on a new creative project. I’m not really ready to talk about it yet, but for the moment, we’ll refer to it as Project Bootstrap. I’ve spent a lot of time working on it this year, and have a lot to show for it, though there is much work left to be done before I attempt to unleash it on the world. Any surplus creative energy I may have had this year was spent on that, which is why I didn’t feel the need to come here as often.

In the new year, I hope to be able to do both. Thanks to those who are still here to read this. Happy New Year!

And a warm Rest in Peace to Betty White who left us yesterday. It was a sad note to play out a lousy year.

The day before each year is an invitation to reflect back on the previous year, and today I can say that I was a fairly crappy blogger this year. Most of the posts from this year are riddles, and even among those, not since August 6.

What can I say? I was pretty well fed up with the state of the world and depressed about any number of things. Ideally, the blog is an opportunity to channel my frustrations into creating something, but it hasn’t been that very much in 2020.

Still, there are a few posts I think are worth highlighting, but only five this year instead of ten. And if you’re reading this, thanks for coming back. I hope to do better for you in 2021.

5. Shakespeare Anagram: Julius Caesar (February 1)

When the Republican-controlled Senate decided to deny the American people an impeachment trial for our criminal president, I wrote this anagram to remind us that we had the power to remove him ourselves in November. And we did!

4. Science is Real (July 4)

One of the prevailing feelings I’ve had about the world for the past few years is helplessness. Everything’s wrong, but what can I do about it? I can vote, sure. I’ve also started writing a poem each Fourth of July, in the hopes of sharing my patriotic spirit with my fellow Americans. This year’s wasn’t my favorite of the three, but it made a point I thought was important.

3. It Is Upon Us (April 10)

It was the fourth anniversary of the death of one of my closest childhood friends, and I took the opportunity to tell a funny story involving him. He would have hated this year just like the rest of us did, but he’d have found a way to make the best of it. This I know.

2. Read Shakespeare Online! (July 17)

One of my favorite things to do is gather with groups of friends to read Shakespeare plays. That was taken from me this year, but my friends continued to meet online to continue our reading groups on Zoom. This post encouraged others to do the same, and shared the resources we use to do it (including the resource page I have on this site).

1. Macbeth 2020 (April 21)

Living in isolation, I was driven to create something, even if I had to do it “all by myself,” as the song goes. Fortunately, the monthly Shakespeare event I used to attend also moved online this year. When the Night Shift Theatre Company transformed the Drunken Shakespeare event (held in a bar) into the Sequestered Shakespeare event (held on Instagram), it gave me the opportunity to reimagine the cauldron scene from Macbeth as a Zoom call in 2020. I posted the video here as well.

Have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2021!

As I like to reflect on the best posts of the blog each year, it makes sense now to look back at the past decade of Shakespeare Teacher to see what’s been accomplished. Rather than individual posts, I’ll be reflecting on threads and themes, but I’ll still present it as a top ten countdown. Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2020!

10. Shakespeare Lists (2011 — 2014)

Sometimes my obsessive Shakespeare fandom runs over the brim, and I have to post a list. In 2011, it was a list of my favorite Shakespeare audio productions. Then, in 2012, I posted a list of Shakespeare’s Top 50 Most Underrated Characters. Later in the year, I added a list of retrochronisms, a word I coined to describe references that were correct in Shakespeare’s time, but potentially misleading when viewed through a modern lens. In 2013, I created a seven-point scale describing how historically “real” the characters in Shakespeare are. And, though it’s only tangentially related to Shakespeare, I’m going to include my 2014 list of literary devices in Disney’s Frozen. After that, I was content to let it go.

9. Shakespeare Follow-Up (2013 — 2017)

I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of Shakespeare’s works as a primary source document for Early Modern England. So when a character from one of the plays refers to “the glorious planet Sol” or proclaims that the “poor world is almost six thousand years old,” we are reminded that we are hearing a voice from over four centuries in the past. Digging into these instances has not only helped illuminate Shakespeare’s worldview for me, but has also given me the opportunity to explore a range of diverse topics from the nature vs. nurture debate to the history of lie detection.

8. Creative Celebrations (2011 — 2019)

It all started in 2011, when I was asked by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to participate in a project where bloggers across the Internet post how Shakespeare has influenced their lives, in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday (April 23). I posted a tongue-in-cheek essay describing how Shakespeare destroyed my life. A week later, I followed up with a satirical post comparing the birther movement to the authorship deniers. This pair of posts got some nice attention and made me think that the occasional humor piece might be a nice addition to the blog. This led to the Shakespeare Autocorrect post on Christmas 2012. I thought it might be festive to do something special for the holiday season. But that one post brought in more traffic, reposts, and backlinks than anything I had ever written before. The following Christmas, 2013, I posted Shakespeare Clickbait, which also proved to be popular. In 2017 and 2018, I celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday with two posts comparing the current White House to characters from Shakespeare, first with Sean Spicer Does Shakespeare and then with Macbeth’s Twitter Feed. In 2019, I continued the birthday celebration with a collection of Shakespeare Memes. These posts remain some of the most popular on the blog.

7. Patriotic Poetry (2018 — 2019)

Sometimes I process my thoughts by writing poems. I don’t usually post them to the blog, other than the Thursday Morning Riddle, of course. But in advance of Independence Day 2018, I noticed a lot of my liberal friends on Facebook were wondering if they could still be patriotic during these troubling times. I wrote Anthem 2018 in response to this and posted it on July 4, because this is every bit as much our country as it is his and that’s ground I’m not willing to concede. On July 4 of this year, I posted another poem, Grateful, which focused on the supporters. I’ll probably do another one this coming July 4, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary after that.

6. Career Highlights (2010 — 2016)

Shakespeare Teacher is essentially a one-man show, so when I get a cool gig in the Shakespeare Teacher world, it’s my pleasure to come here and share it with you. The decade kicked off nicely when I published a book chapter in 2010 on teaching Shakespeare in the elementary school. Then, in 2012, I had the opportunity to serve as a member of an Educational Advisory Board for the PBS documentary Shakespeare Uncovered. In 2016, I was hired as a “Shakespeare Expert” on a Shakespeare-themed Celebrity Cruise, giving four talks onboard the ship and escorting shore excursions to Shakespeare-related destinations.

5. Shakespeare Song Parodies (2012 — 2013)

This was a temporary weekly series, but one of my favorite features on the blog. Basically, each week I would take the lyrics to a well-known song and I’d rewrite them to make the song about Shakespeare. I ended up writing 40 parodies in total: one for each of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, one for the sonnets, and a final tribute to all of the plays together. It seemed to be a popular feature at the time, and remains one of the highlights of the site. It was also cited in a peer-reviewed journal article that discussed Shakespeare contrafacta (apparently the real term for what I was doing).

4. Shakespeare Anagram (Saturdays)

If you would have told me a decade ago that this feature would still be going, I’d have had my doubts. In recent years, I’ve been adding in a political essay along with the anagram, hoping the novelty of the art form might draw some attention to topics such as the scapegoating of immigrants or the administration’s family separation policy. But my favorite anagram of the decade was when I anagrammed a Shakespeare sonnet into a new sonnet to make a statement about marriage equity, almost a year before Obergfell v. Hodges would be decided.

3. Family Trees for Shakespeare’s Histories (2014 — 2018)

In the summer of 2014, I put together a series of family trees for members of the Plantagenet family who appear as characters in Shakespeare’s history tetralogies. The idea was that they would serve as a resource for 21st century Americans reading these plays that were written for the audiences of 16th century London. When the site was expanded in 2018, I elevated the trees to have their own page. Whether these charts help clarify or add additional confusion I leave as a judgement for the reader. But I sure learned a lot from compiling them.

2. Thursday Morning Riddle (Thursdays)

What can I say about the Thursday Morning Riddle? It’s my best friend. It’s my worst enemy. When I don’t have to wake up early, it wakes me up early, and when I do have to wake up early, it wakes me up earlier. It keeps me going when I can’t go any further, and it has sustained the blog though long periods when I didn’t have any other writing in me. It has entertained children, been a hit at dinner parties, and brought in new readers to the blog over the years. And I have to give a special shout-out to my friend Asher. This site might not be here today if, during those lean months, its readership had dropped to zero instead of a reliable one.

1. Shakespeare Reading Group Resource Page (2018)

I can’t tell you what I was put on this earth to do. But if the answers are in the back of the book, and I learn someday that it was to do this, I might not be entirely surprised. I take immense, almost religious, pleasure and fulfillment from participating in Shakespeare readings with like-minded friends, and if I can help bring that experience to others, then I must. What more could a Shakespeare Teacher ask for than an outlet to help bring the text to a wider audience? Go check it out, and see if you can gather a group together to give it a try.

Another year has gone by, and the time has come once again to look back over the past twelve months to remember the best posts of the year.

10. Thursday Morning Riddle (Thursdays)

This is more of a category entry than a single post. But this was a particularly good year for the blog’s longest-running feature. Nine distinct solvers cracked the year’s 41 riddles. Independence Day and Halloween always fall on the same day of the year; this year it was Thursday, so we got two extra holiday-themed riddles in addition to the yearly Thanksgiving riddle. I was able to experiment with some intertextual riddles (here and here) as well as some unusual rhymes (here and here). This year also saw the 500th riddle on the website. Have I really written 500 riddles? Who am I?

9. Theatre: Titan Theatre Company’s Hamlet (April 7)

Calling this show “the best production of Hamlet I have ever seen” was no small compliment. And, indeed, my enthusiasm for Titan’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s flagship play led me to outline in some detail my experience in attending it. I shared the review with my friends who were in the play and I came to understand that it circulated among the cast. The next thing I know, Titan has linked to the review from their website and they’re using a pull quote from the review in their print promotional materials! I’ve been back to see a few more of their shows since then; I highly recommend checking them out.

8. Shakespeare Anagram: Hamlet (October 19)

This one makes the list for the anagram, not the essay. This is my favorite of the year. The short anagrams are the most difficult, and I really liked the way the letters came together to make a coherent sentence. The quote was well-known, and both the quote and anagram applied well to the essay subject. It was everything I look for in a good Shakespeare anagram, and I’m pleased to include it here on the year-end list.

7. Lessons from Shakespeare: The Duke of Buckingham (July 28)

It was meant to be a regular feature, and may yet be, but so far there is only one of them. The idea was to take a closer look at one aspect of a Shakespeare play and apply the lessons we learn from it to today. In the lone installment, we look at the Duke of Buckingham from Richard III, and ask ourselves if silence in the face of evil is the best path, even if it is only a survival strategy.

6. More Shakespeare! (January 13)

This was just a short announcement, but for something exciting to me. Last year, I launched a resource page for people doing Shakespeare reading groups. Originally, I had posted divisions for 16 plays. But over the winter break last year, I added 8 more, for a total of 24. If you’re here reading this, why not consider putting together your own reading group?

5. Another Open Letter to Donald Trump (September 28)

Wouldn’t it just be easier if he were to step down? I make the case. Spoiler alert: he didn’t.

4. NSFW: Shakespeare Pick-Up Lines (August 21)

I wrote these for a performance I was giving in a Shakespeare event at a local bar. The piece was a big hit with the Bard-savvy crowd, so I decided to publish it here. Enjoy!

3. Shakespeare Anagram: Henry VI, Part Three (July 6)

This one makes the list for the essay, not the anagram, though the anagram is pretty good, too. The essay is about the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border. Of the many, many instances where this president has shown himself unfit, this may be the absolute worst. And it’s still going on.

2. Grateful (July 4)

Last July 4, I wrote a poem about America, which in 2018 was mostly about retaining the ability to love our country while the president is so awful. This year, I focused my verse on his supporters. I may have lost a few people with this poem, but I guess I lost them a long time ago.

1. Shakespeare Memes (April 23)

For Shakespeare’s birthday this year, I repurposed 15 popular memes and made them about Shakespeare. From “Distracted Boyfriend” to “American Chopper Argument,” there’s something for everyone in here. After all, one does not simply celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday!

It’s time once again to look back at the last year of blogging and pick out the top posts.

I warn you in advance that four of the five are about Individual 1. Say what you will about this administration, but it does inspire some of my most motivated writing.

The fifth post is an announcement about changes to the website that I’ve been planning for a very long time and that I was finally able to complete this year.

Here are the top five Shakespeare Teacher posts from 2018:

5. Space Force! (August 10)

When Republicans want to do something they think is important, like corporate tax cuts or building a wall, nobody asks them how they are going to pay for it. If something’s a high priority, you find a way. But when Democrats want to protect the environment or provide for universal healthcare, suddenly the nation has empty pockets. This essay shows how the president’s unexpected call for a Space Force might help us all find some common ground.

4. Shakespeare Anagram: Sir Thomas More (June 30)

I wasn’t going to be happy with the policies of a Republican administration regardless. But I feel like the scapegoating of Latinos and Muslims that is occurring at the highest levels of this government goes far beyond left and right, and actually represents a betrayal of American values, both liberal and conservative. The essay that precedes the anagram focuses on Latino immigration, and uses a powerful speech from Shakespeare to highlight the main idea.

3. Macbeth’s Twitter Feed (April 23)

In honor of Shakespeare’s birthday, I mocked up images of a fake Twitter feed. It was purportedly from the historical Macbeth, but it was written in the style of You Know Who. It turned out to be a surprisingly good match. Macbeth’s paranoia and arrogance matched the same qualities in the grandstander-in-chief. In some cases, I was able to simply modify real presidential tweets; in others, I just used actual quotes from the play. The two temperaments blended together seamlessly.

2. Anthem 2018 (July 4)

Heading into Independence Day, a lot of my Facebook friends were openly wondering if they could still be patriotic when our leadership was taking us so far astray. I had planned to write a July 4th post celebrating the best of America. While drafting the essay, I wrote the line “We have conquered worse than this when we were not as strong.” And that’s when I realized that the post wasn’t an essay; it was a poem. I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

1. Shakespeare Teacher 2.0 (August 31)

This was the year that Shakespeare Teacher went from being an entertainment blog to being a resource-rich website. This happened when I added a new page to support Shakespeare reading groups with role divisions. I also added a new page to display my Plantagenet family trees. What’s in store for the future? Now that I have a home page and an organizational structure in place, I might add some new features. I also may continue to update existing features. Stay tuned!

Has it really been four months since I’ve posted? Surely, the world needs my special brand of whatever the hell it is I do here, now more than ever.

The year got off to a pretty good start, and since I was productive here for at least the first eight months of it, I think it’s time to bring back an old feature: the best posts of the year recap.

I skipped the feature in 2015, since the only really notable post I wrote was a tribute to Grant Wiggins. In 2016, the only posts of any substance were about the cruise. But this year, the year the site reached 200,000 hits, even though my stamina ran out two-thirds of the way through, I did manage to put together a few posts I’d like to remember when looking through this category link in years to come.

So without further ado, I present the top five Shakespeare Teacher posts of the year 2017:

5. Shakespeare Anagram: Twelfth Night (August 25)

Since Donald Trump became president, the Shakespeare Anagram has undergone an evolution of sorts. It’s always been somewhat political (which is often the point), but this year the anagrams have been accompanied by increasingly lengthy essays inspired by the topic of the anagram. This was the last one I did this year. Compare it to the first one I did this year, and you’ll notice the shift.

4. Shakespeare Follow-Up: Lie Detection (June 30)

An off-handed comment by Duncan in Macbeth inspired a deep examination into how lie detection has been viewed and used over the centuries. It also brought back a feature that I enjoy very much, and hope to continue in the future.

3. Making History (March 5)

This is another long one, but I had a lot to get off my chest. An Arkansas Republican tried to have the works of Howard Zinn banned from state-funded schools, and it set me off. When we decide how we are going to teach history, we need to first decide why we teach history, and we may not all agree on the answer.

2. Sean Spicer Does Shakespeare (April 23)

What if Sean Spicer hadn’t worked for Donald Trump, but instead was the spokesman for Shakespeare’s King Richard III? It might look a little something like this. I had thought about following up with Sean Spicer as the front man for Macbeth, insisting that Macbeth never met with the witches before becoming King, and then admitting that he had but there was no collusion. Alas, Sean’s time at the podium came to a sudden end before I could write it.

1. An Open Letter to President Trump (March 12)

This is sort of a comedy piece, but I’m actually serious about the underlying idea. There’s no reason Donald Trump shouldn’t support single payer. And he really is the only one who could make it happen. If he did, he might actually be seen as the great leader he thinks he is now. Believe me.

So… it’s been a light blogging year.

There seems to be a cycle where the more I write, the more people visit, and the more I want to write. But the same phenomenon works in the other direction. I also think that blogs are generally in decline these days. Many thanks to the readers who have stuck with the blog while it has been mostly riddles and anagrams. I hope to have more for you in the new year.

Still, we did manage to reach 150,000 views last month, just two short years after hitting 100,000, so that’s not nothing. Let’s have some cake.

The 150,000th hit came in at 11:02pm on Wednesday, November 26, 2014 from Denver, Colorado. The mile-high milestone found the site via a Google search and viewed the Teach Along with the Frozen Soundtrack post.

So I’m not giving up yet, and I’ve paid to renew the domain name and hosting services for another three years. So the blog will be here for us if we wish to be here for it, at least until December 2017.

And there were a few posts this year that I was proud to write and happy to see find an audience. There weren’t ten of them, but I’d put the top five up against the best of the rest, so let’s get right to it!

5. Thursday Morning Riddle: Ambiguous Edition (December 18)

This was a riddle that had two possible answers, each of which fit all of the clues. I’ve never done that before, and don’t expect to be doing it again any time soon.

4. A Good Pairing (February 9)

In a rare digression into teaching Shakespeare, I compare the literary devices between popular song lyrics and a Shakespeare sonnet. This pairing has been teacher-tested and student-approved!

3. Plantagenetics (December 2)

Do recent revelations about infidelity in the royal family cast doubts on the legitimacy of the Queen? No. No, they don’t.

2. Teach Along with the Frozen Soundtrack (June 2)

This is an exploration of some of the literary, poetic, and rhetorical devices in the soundtrack for Disney’s Frozen that you can point out for students, or have them find for you.

1. Family Trees for Shakespeare’s Histories (September 19)

I’ve been meaning to do this for years, and I finally did it! Each play’s tree shows who’s living, who’s dead, who’s related to whom, who is actually in the play, and what names might be used to reference them. Enjoy!

Have a Happy New Year, and I’ll see you in 2015! (Probably…)

Once again, I present my top ten favorite posts of the year as a countdown. Only three of this year’s entries deal directly with the Common Core.

10. The Wager (April 28)

My friend Brian bet me he could pass my Shakespeare final without taking the course, and I accepted his wager. We both ended up learning more than we had expected.

9. Shakespeare and the Common Core (January 6)

Does the Common Core really eliminate all literature in favor of dry government manuals? Not even close. In fact, Shakespeare is actually mandated by the Common Core.

8. Shakespeare Follow-Up: Circumnavigation (November 29)

This year saw a new feature added to the blog: The Shakespeare Follow-Up. I chose this one, following up from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a representative sample.

7. Cleopatra’s Facebook (April 17)

This project actually happened two years ago, but I worked with a class of 6th grade students who created a Facebook page for the Egyptian queen, reflecting the events of Antony and Cleopatra.

6. Don’t Be Rotten to the Core (October 2)

While I do have some specific concerns about the Common Core, fixating on distortions and distractions prevents us from having the real conversations we need to have about education.

5. Shakespeare Clickbait (December 25)

What if we used the same tactics to get people to read Shakespeare that websites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy use to get readers to click on their stories? I present: Shakespeare Clickbait.

4. Danny and the Death Ray (January 9)

This is a nice little story about a small town, and one boy who dared to speak out in order to save it. Some people read into it as an allegory for something else, but I just don’t see it.

3. In the Zone (March 6)

Wouldn’t it be a shame if the Common Core really were a better way to structure education, but nobody ever knew it because the implementation had been botched so badly?

2. Shakespeare Song Parody: We Love the Plays of Shakespeare (June 28)

The ongoing Shakespeare Song Parody feature came to an end this year, but not before the appearance of this swan song, paying tribute to all of the plays one last time.

1. How Real is Richard? (February 13)

When the bones of King Richard III were unearthed earlier this year, I was inspired to create a seven-point scale to rate how “real” each of Shakespeare’s characters actually are.

Have a Happy New Year, and I hope to see you in 2014!

Once again, I present my top ten favorite posts of the year as a countdown. This year, nine of the ten deal directly with Shakespeare.

10. Film: The Tempest (July 29)

This is a review of the filmed version of a stage production of The Tempest from the Stratford Festival in Canada, with Des McAnuff directing Christopher Plummer as Prospero. The review talks about the film, the play, and the conventions of film vs. theatre.

9. Some Context (September 23)

I examine some of the quotes that were taken out of context during the 2012 presidential race, particularly those that tell a convenient story about the person being misquoted. Sometimes, however, the quote is even worse when viewed in context.

8. Connecting Students with the Language (August 1)

Just as we make Shakespeare more relevant to our students by drawing modern-day connections to his plots and characters, so too can we use the elements of today’s world to help them make connections to iambic pentameter, as well as other poetic devices.

7. Conundrum: Prospero’s Books (August 21)

This is a complex logic puzzle that uses the titles of Shakespeare’s plays as a part of the game. You don’t need to know anything about Shakespeare to solve the puzzle, nor will Shakespeare knowledge actually help you, but manipulating the familiar names may add to the fun.

6. Kevin Spacey as Richard III (January 15)

I was lucky enough to get to see Kevin Spacey play the title role in Richard III, and instead of writing a proper review, I decided to write a sophomoric parody of one of the scenes, replacing most of Richard’s lines with quotes from Kevin Spacey movies. Enjoy!

5. Shakespeare’s Most Underrated Characters (August 5)

Inspired by Cassius from Pursued by a Bear, I explore fifty minor characters from Shakespeare’s canon that I think are defined by more than their line counts. Wife of Simpcox, I’m looking at you.

4. Shakespeare Song Parody: Mourn This Way (September 7)

This year saw the genesis of a brand new regular feature on the blog, the Shakespeare Song Parody. I chose this Hamlet/Lady Gaga mash-up as a representative favorite. Runners-up included Agamemnon Style, The Death of Kings, and Lady, It’s Warm Outside.

3. Shakespeare Autocorrect (December 25)

I was enjoying some year-end lists of best Autocorrects when I had the idea to mock-up some examples of how Autocorrect might cause problems of Shakespearean proportions. The concept was a hit on Twitter, and the post earned a last-minute spot on this Top Ten list. Sorry, Shakespeare Palindrome.

2. Shakespeare Anagram: Sonnet CXVI (July 28)

This is not only my favorite anagram of the year, but is also one of my favorite anagrams from the past six years of the blog. I take a Shakespeare sonnet about marriage and anagram it into an original sonnet about same-sex marriage. Check it out!

1. Top Ten Shakespeare Retrochronisms (October 3)

A retrochronism is a word I coined to describe a term in a literary work that is misinterpreted by future generations. In this post, you will find numerous examples from Shakespeare. I had a lot of fun writing this, and I’m really pleased with the way it came out.

This year, I present my top ten favorite posts as a countdown. Only three of the entries deal directly with the authorship question.

10. Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Floods, and Tornadoes (August 28)

Come read the story of how I survive the worst earthquake in, as far as I know, East Coast history, and completely fail to notice. However, other natural disasters of biblical proportions do manage to cause me some minor inconvenience.

9. It’s a Poor Workman Who Blames Yogi Berra: Artificial Intelligence and Jeopardy! (February 23)

A computer beat humans at Jeopardy!, and I put on my school data specialist’s cap to do an item analysis of the responses. Read through to the comments to see two veteran Shakespeare bloggers debate the nature of language and technology.

8. Question of the Week (January 3)

Is teaching an art or a science? Or is it both? Or is it neither? Once a purely philosophical topic, recent developments in the field have made it a question with far-reaching implications in practice and policy.

7. Film: Anonymous (November 13)

I was as surprised as you were, but I actually liked it. So, I give it a good review. Because to be angry with this film is to acknowledge that we are actually engaging in a discussion about authorship. We aren’t, but it was a good film nevertheless.

6. Top Ten Shakespeare Audio Productions (August 29)

This is just what it sounds like, except I actually list twenty. And Bob D fills in some titles I missed. It just goes to show that Shakespeare will always be in my heart… and in my ear.

5. Fifty Apps for the iPad (January 9)

I identify ten things the iPad does better than the iPod Touch, while linking to fifty apps you can do them with. This one was popular among friends and family, and generated a lot of traffic as well.

4. A Choice to Make (April 13)

Eric Hanushek wrote something I didn’t like, and I explain why. Of all of my rants about education reform over the year, this one was the most rambling and wild-eyed. I highly recommend it.

3. Another Story (November 22)

To further make my point about Anonymous, I spin the most ridiculous science-fiction, bodice-ripping thriller I can imagine, positing that Shakespeare was given the plays by space aliens. If you’re secure in the knowledge that Shakespeare wrote the plays, this is what Anonymous looks like to you.

2. Under the Influence (April 23)

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust asked me to participate in a project in which bloggers describe in a blog post how Shakespeare has influenced their lives. People told me they thought my contribution was funny. If they only knew…

1. The Hartfordian Theory (April 27)

Long before the Anonymous controversy started brewing, I took my own shot at the Oxfordians. Actually, my real target was the birthers, but the idea is the same. What if people questioned President Obama’s legitimacy using the same arguments that Oxfordians use to question the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays? Hilarity ensues… except for one hasty reader who somehow thought I was serious; read through to the comments.