Here's to you, Steve Jobs!

Funniest thing, Steve Jobs started following me on Pinterest today. It's funny because, well you know...

But honestly, it's great that it occurred just as I was trying to summon up the courage to pick this blog back up. Sometimes we take ourselves so seriously (preaching to myself here:) that we let valuable opportunities, connections, and maybe even relationships pass us by because we're too concerned with image rather than with what's real beneath our image.

The truth is that I lost the joy of blogging a long time ago. I used to blog faithfully and loved every single, tortuous minute of it. It was a great escape, a place to log thoughts, ideas, feelings, and life happenings. Some days I wrote about things that touched my soul, other days I chronicled funny events from the day. Some days were all about poetry and, still others, were nothing more than a collection of pictures that spoke to me.

And then I became a teacher and began to teach writing to a bunch of high school kids. I went in SO STINKING CONFIDENT, just knowing - knowing - that I was going to single-handedly inspire the next generation of writers.

It didn't take long for me to tuck my tail and head for shelter and - for me - that shelter was somewhere far, far away from the blogging world. My confidence in my own abilities, talents, and gifts was severely tested inside those first few years of teaching. I quickly realized that writing according to TEA standards was nothing like writing from the heart - probably the one thing I wanted most to impart to my classroom of budding writers.

Instead I had to learn to staunch my own creative urges in order to learn to teach writing in a whole new "barbaric" way. I was faced with the challenge of teaching students how to write expository and persuasive essay writing within the confines of a stringent, strangely forulaic rubric that included a length of only 26 lines.

It doesn't take an English teacher to tell you that an essay is so, so much more than 26 lines. It's about the "soul" that is discovered through writing. 26 lines leave very little room for soul. Instead, it is too often one-dimensional and lacks that certain something that has readers