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Affordable Care Act issues are expected to dominate discussions of insurance in the Legislature in the weeks ahead but lawmakers will also take swipes at workers compensation, hurricane preparations and Citizens Property Insurance Corp when they return.

The work of a biographer might seem straightforward enough.  Although the general public might consider the genre a sub-category of nonfiction writing, the best works transcend that title, and stand apart as a class of their own.  Biographies contain facts and historical documentation about the life of particular subject, and in this way meet the criteria for nonfiction.  In a talk at the Key West Literary Seminar on Saturday, however, acclaimed biographer Jay Parini declared, “All biography is a work of fiction.  It's an illusion of a life that may relate to reality.”

At the Shanker Blog researcher Matthew Di Carlo reviews the effectiveness of the suite of education policies often called the “Florida model.”

These ideas include assigning A through F grades to schools and school districts based in part on standardized test results, retaining low-performing third graders, expanding school choice, teacher evaluations and others.

Those of us who speak more than one language are aware of the power and issues related to translation.  For many of us it is a constant internal dialog, full of traps and the dangers of double entendres.  The anxiety that the process brings about is the very reason why skillful translators are so valued.
In it's essence, the act of translating is a multi thronged process.  There is the literal, and then there is the intangible, the true root that translation attempts to illuminate.  In the end the translation inevitably fails to some degree to reach this ultimate goal.

This post is featured thanks to our friends at the Key West Literary Seminar. Read more of their material here.

The enthusiasm of WLRN's Twitter followers combined with the 31st annual Key West Literary Seminar has inspired the second round of Tweet Us A Story.

Last time, author Junot Diaz kicked off the Twitter event. We'll be grabbing a first line this weekend from one of the KWLS authors.

Here's How It Works:

As states start phasing in Common Core standards in public school classrooms, no Common Core textbooks have been written yet, and new assessments are still being developed.

So, teachers are creating their own lesson plans as they begin to implement the standards.

They’re not doing it alone.

University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene has weighed in on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s conclusions about its teacher evaluation study.

While the rest of the country (except for maybe the folks in Alabama) might be suffering from cold weather and holiday hangovers this time of year, the sun never stops in South Florida. Winter is when our events move outside.

Florida's county elections supervisors are preparing to approach the Legislature with their own fixes for the voting problems that worsened the state's already-sketchy reputation for competence last year.

Their plan: Require at least eight day of early voting with an option for 14 in counties that need it, and hold lawmakers to the same 75-word limit on ballot questions for constitutional amendments that citizens must observe with their own ballot initiatives

On The Florida Roundup:  Saturday marks the third anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti.  How has it affected us in South Florida, home to the nation’s largest Haitian diaspora?   We take your calls on what you have seen in Haiti and what responsibility we have to this country less than 700 miles away.   Why has development been so slow after so many promises?

Forty-five states and the District of Columbia are working toward full implementation of Common Core standards.

But there's a split in the way states will measure what students have learned. Two different testing systems are on the table.

One test will average a series of test results to determine a student’s score. The other is a single, adaptive test which tailors questions based on a student’s past answers.

The tests are being designed now for use by 2014-15.

Just because you can’t drive down for the 31st annual Key West Literary Seminar, doesn’t mean you can’t take part.

WLRN is teaming up with the KWLS folks to bring the conversations online.

The elections supervisor in the state capital says the Legislature will have to make changes to avoid what happened during the last election.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have filed bills in Tallahassee to increase the number of early voting hours.

Proposals by the Democrats call for a return to 14 days of early voting.

All this week we've been bringing you the story of Fabienne Jean, a dancer who lost her right leg three years ago in the earthquake in Haiti.

Fabienne’s right leg was crushed and had to be amputated. When she danced again, she was hailed as a symbol of Haiti’s post-earthquake recovery.

But as reporter Jacob Kushner discovered during the year he spent reporting on this story, the quest to rebuild one woman’s life would take much more than that.

It's been three years since an earthquake leveled Port au Prince and shook all of us indirectly in South Florida, home to the nation's largest population of Haitian-Americans.

Miami Herald reporter Jacqueline Charles remembers January 12, 2010, well.

That day, Charles was in the process of writing a story about Haiti's latest mess, a controversy over the government taking a loan from Venezuela to help the country rebuild an airport.

The big Everglades python hunt starts Saturday and, so far, 670 people have signed up for the fun and a chance at cash prizes.

Among them is our intrepid U. S. Senator, Bill Nelson. He and a companion -- described in the Tampa Bay Times as a "rancher from Davie" -- will strap on pistols and machetes on Thursday  to go after the huge Burmese pythons that Nelson has  worried so much about, occasionally to the amusement of his Senate colleagues.

This Sunday, Nigerian Afro-beat artist Femi Kuti will be performing in Miami. Femi is known for using music to protest against the Nigerian government -- a legacy he inherited from his father, the legendary Afro-beat pioneer Fela Kuti.

An appeals court says a South Florida union leader can have a gun at work, even without a concealed-weapons permit.

This case revolves around whether a union is considered a “place of business.”

State law allows people to have guns at work even if they don’t have a permit.

But Torrence Little was arrested anyway.

In June of 2011, someone reported a man with a gun in a union hall parking lot in Ft. Lauderdale.

Little had a gun in his waistband under his shirt. Police took him into custody on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon.

Most of the victims of the Newtown school massacre were just like Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy's daughter: seven-year-old first graders at a public school.

"If a similar tragedy were visited upon me and my family, I would be beside myself," he says. "But I think one of my ways of healing would be attempting to find out what went wrong, where was the failure."

But trying to start a public discussion of the public's small hope of ever finding out what went wrong has been costly. 

Flu season has begun with a bang and more than half the states, including Florida, have been classified "high" activity areas by the U. S. Centers for Disease Control.

It's worse than usual, doctors say.

The Miami Herald says five percent of Florida emergency room and clinic visits are by patients with flu symptoms. Two Florida children have died and the last time the state saw such widespread flu was in 2009.

With another legislative fight brewing, the Florida Medical Association is signaling that it could play a large role this year in a debate about limiting the amount of money doctors can charge for dispensing drugs to workers' compensation insurance patients.

The announcement that a Miami-raised son of Cuban immigrants has been chosen as the inaugural poet for President Obama's swearing-in ceremony is causing a stir throughout South Florida.  And nowhere more than in our region's literary community.

In 1993, a young civil engineer named Richard Blanco wanted to try his hand at writing poetry.  So he took a class at Florida International University, led by English Professor Campbell McGrath.

Sen. Eleanor Sobel (D-Hollywood) has filed a "domestic partnership" bill for the March session of the Florida Legislature. It would allow same-sex couples to establish recognized relationships that provide at least some marital benefits.

One opponent of the bill said it would not get far in the Republican-dominated Legislature.

Ailing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez won't be able to attend his scheduled swearing-in this week. But his congressional allies have voted to allow the ceremony to be delayed while he recovers from his cancer surgery in Cuba. 

It's estimated that more than 100,000  Venezuelans now live in South Florida legally and many more are undocumented residents who left their homeland to flee Chavez’s leftist regime.

Tallahassee may be hundreds of miles away, but WLRN and The Miami Herald will bring it to you. 

All this week we've been bringing you the story of Fabienne Jean, a dancer who lost her leg in the earthquake in Haiti three years ago. A prosthetic technician from Boston helped Fabienne get a replacement leg.

He hoped to help her recover in other ways too: to start  a business, buy a house and open up a dance studio. 

But none of these things came to pass. Late spring, Fabienne was struggling to find money to take care of her bedridden mother and adopted daughter. 

In the national media today, James Tracy is the nutty professor. The whacko professor. The one-man argument for abolishing tenure.