Coming home from visiting Kelly and family today we hopped off the turnpike to take winding route 30 through PA. Coal country. Laurel Highla...

This cave in, this hurricane, this almond-sized explosive device found in the breast of my daughter Kelly. This can't happen. That's...

What could bring 3 generations of chicks together for a fun night along with a gender, age, race, economic diverse audience of great music a...

Austin is hot -- once again. I mean the thermostat in the car read 108 one day. That's hotter than a match head, as the saying goes. For...

I was browsing blogs, putting off working on taxes and the evil treadmill and I came across this phrase: "Michael Vick and the hideous...

We keep the doors open in the summer. For the dogs. Or that's the excuse. The sliding glass door off of our bedroom, the side kitchen do...

I dream about crab grass. What a pathetic confession! Crab grass slinks into my gardens, sending its scouts ahead of each invasion like spac...

Everyday I read the Huffington Post the way my Dad used to read the Free Press in Detroit. Today I read that some high school scholars took ...

Our family flows toward the Atlantic each summer with our rafts, sunscreen and spawn. We go there to study our familial three R's, to r...

Everything in NYC is bigger, faster, brighter. After a day's work in Brooklyn, Louisa, Kelly and I supped at a little Italian (yummy) pl...

Just back from a Janet Allen Institute in Florida. The skies were blanketed heavily with what looked to be rain clouds but turned out to be...

Once a year reading teachers from all over gather at the International Reading Association meeting -- this year in an attempt to fulfill its...

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will no...

It's that time of year when every kid, teacher, custodian and fraying folder starts crying RECESS. Summer break is breathing hot and hea...

Yesterday at an elementary school came this question from a fifth grader, "have you ever written a poem about the idiot president?...

The eighth graders were restless this afternoon. Every poem inspired a volley of verbal fire with the cannons to the right of them, cannons...

Yesterday, I read an article in the Washington Post that said that the Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading init...

This was such a sad week -- I was in a hotel all last week where the story of the killings at Virginia Tech dominated my room in a constant ...

I remember when my daughter Kelly was getting married, her husband to be, Brian, wasn't all that thrilled about going with her to pick o...

First of all -- I LOVE when teachers have kids think of questions for the author in advance. Of course we NEVER stick to the questions on th...