Boxcar Writing Labs Resources

Best Books of 2019

Creating a best book list is a highly subjective activity. According to The New York Times, their process begins in January of the new year, includes anyone who works in their department, and then narrows down to a small group of reviewers. "One of the great strengths of the Book Review is that we deliberately have a staff of 11 readers who do not have the same taste,” says Pamela Paul the editor of the New York Times Book Review.

Don't worry. When it comes to my list, there's no team. It's just me and my taste. And since subjectivity is the reigning criterion, what you'll find here is more of a list of favorites rather than what literary critics consider 'best.' That said, I cannot abide crappy writing. And so I suppose there is something that remains from my two degrees in English and the nearly twenty years of teaching university students.

For my Favorites of 2019, I’ve used two criteria: how much I liked it and why I think you...

Is Listening to Audiobooks Really Reading?

In my last quarter of undergraduate school, I took a final required class: Applied Linguistics. I had no idea what to expect, but proceeded to have my mind blown. From learning how young children can’t use irregular grammar until they've reach a marked developmental milestone [He 'taked' the ball from me] to discovering that linguists had written some of my favorite books [dictionaries], each class was a marvel.

But when Professor Childs taught us that our brains don’t really “see” the words in our mind when we read, I raised my hand. “Professor,” I said. “I alway see the words." He was a very smart and eccentric man. He’d done research all over the world, even documented languages never before written. And he didn’t mind correcting me that ‘no,' I did not see words when I read. Perhaps I imagined I did, he said, but “we” know that people don’t really “see” letters but identify words as...

What Sir Ken Robinson Can Teach You about Thinking and Reading Critically

Despite what we know today about multiple intelligences, dominant learning styles, learning disabilities, attention spans, and neurological and developmental differences, much of education expects students to respond and behave the same way.

From standardized testing to uniform assignments and in-class lessons, sameness is our normal. And it’s not just what and how we teach in school, it’s how we expect students to progress during and after school. In fact, the accepted formula for success in America also resembles a straight line: graduate high school, go to college, get a job. And if you're not the exception to this rule of progression, I bet you know someone who is.

There the well-known stories, remarkable stories of CEOs, like Steve Jobs, who dropped out of college, athletes, like Lebron James who skip college to play professional sports, and even Nobel Peace Prize winners, like Malala, who change the world before they finish high school.

If you’ve...