"All this happened, more or less."

Warning: plot spoilers ahead... It's funny. Sometimes, the films and books I enjoy the most are the ones that I initially approached with hesitancy or ambivalence. Having recently finished the second book in a row for our book club that I found merely mildly entertaining, I had no real hopes for Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven , which I had not even heard of prior to the suggestion by one of our club members. With no expectations in mind, I skimmed the comments on the back cover and inside flap, but they didn't give much away. Thus, I started reading with almost no information about the book, its author, or even its genre. I knew it was post-apocalyptic, but was it dystopian? Was it similar to Cormac McCarthy's The Road ? Would it feature a teen love story as depicted in both  The Hunger Games trilogy and the Divergent series? I had several post-apocalyptic stories in mind as I began to read; boy was I surprised to find one that was different! Typically, aut...

Six months have passed since I had the opportunity to participate in the North Star of Texas National Writing Project’s summer institute. Even while I was still working through that process – researching, practicing, and writing – I knew that it was a life-changing experience. I saw how the chance to write freely, in an atmosphere of mutual respect, resulted in beautiful, rich prose that we often didn't believe ourselves capable of writing. I vowed to incorporate true writing workshop strategies into my classroom so that my students could experience the same feelings of success and camaraderie. More than anything, I wanted them to understand that they are writers. Everyone who writes is a writer. With practice, writers become good or great . Yesterday, students wrote freely for about 10 minutes. During freewriting, students do not write to a prompt, and the only rule is to keep writing without stopping to edit. What if they can’t think of anything to write? They write so...

In the Dallas area, we spend a lot of time in traffic.  It’s a drivers’ city, where destinations are spread out. Thus, we can be found navigating high-fives, wondering if every new highway will be a tollway (and wondering what happened to freeways), and sitting at red lights. As curious as I am about people, I don’t often look at the people seated in the cars around me at stoplights. For some reason, it seems invasive. I don’t know why I feel that way; perhaps it’s because of all the leering men I noted staring back beginning at far too young an age. I simply don’t look, and I don’t like it when people look at me. What’s to see? I’m sitting there, waiting for the light to turn green. Just like everyone else. I do, however, note everything about the cars around me. I often pass my time taking in the subtle details that tell far more than many people realize. The location and size of dings, which door handles are worn the most, Louisiana plates dated prior to Hurricane Katrina,...