I'm a Nashville based freelance writer / blogger and teacher with nearly twenty-five years of writing and teaching experience behind me. I love covering a diverse range of topics including education, SAT preparation, nature writing, personal finance, and business. I enjoy doing in-depth research for all of my articles and really commit myself to all of the work that I get involved in.

I also really love connecting with new people and collaborating on writing projects. I'm also always on the lookout for new blogging jobs. Link up with me on Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1510310891&ref=name) If you send a social networking request, be sure to let me know why you're interested in connecting.

I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee and attended a preparatory school named Montgomery Bell Academy. This school gained some recognition about a decade ago because the Tom Schulman, the screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society, had attended MBA and had based the characters on his friends and one special teacher he had by the name of Sam Pickering. If you like to read, pick up a collection of Sam Pickering's essays; you won't be disappointed. In fact, if you are looking for writer to emulate, look no further. Pickering is erudite, warm, funny, intelligent, and clever.

After the movie came out, I attended a seminar at Vanderbilt University where the screenwriter was on a panel with his former teacher. As it turns out, Pickering was funnier than Robin Williams. I know that's hard to believe. However, he talked about he had changed as a teacher. He no longer meets with students in between classes like he used to; now he has a wife and family.

The topic was: Did the teacher John Keating of the film act responsibly? The practical side of us all recognizes how this teacher lead his students on a dangerous path. The romantic side of us mourns that this passionate teacher lost his job and that sometimes bureaucratic school systems run by administrators who see the world in black and white terms are tough on charismatic teachers. Look at the Harry Potter novels. Once you get beyond the mythological creatures and the witches, you realize it is essentially a story about school politics. And good teachers like Lupin and Hagrid are always at the mercy of larger, stronger forces.

In one of the beginning scenes of the film, John Keating describes how the text book his school is using wants to quantify good writing. Keating in a dramatic gesture throws the book out of the window. As an English teacher, I have always had trouble placing a grade on a piece of writing. Rubrics help, but you always come back to how do you place a number on a good idea.

My mentor in graduate school Ken Macrorie wrote a book called 20 Twenty Teachers where he stated that good teachers balance objectivity and subjectivity. However,  Ken published his book in the eighties, and now we live in a world of high stakes testing. I told an administrator recently that I am going to write a piece called "The Death of Subjectivity" because the age in which we live places a high premium on numbers. Listen, I worked for a year in a brokerage firm, and I quickly learned that one can create numbers to justify any story. 

When we were in school, we usually wrote for the teacher. We had to adopt a voice and write on subjects that would please him or her. The reality is that in the real world there is a marketplace of ideas and some will love our writing and some won't. In the world outside school people will write because they have to say something and they may write for themselves.

HubPages will give you numbers that will provide an assessment of your writing. It will be based on the numbers of visitors and the ratings they give you. I love the philosophy of Hubpages because it provides an arena for people who want to write to publish their stuff. However, this is not a perfect system either. There are some writers who will show you pictures of thinly-clad Aphrodites to titillate you. And they do it because this tactic works. It brings visitors to the site who have the potential to buy a product. Welcome to the subtilties and contradictions of capitalism. ( You mean you don't think that a football player is worth 100 million dollars and a teacher is only worth 50K? ) Wait for my next article, "Why American Women are the Best Looking Women in the World."