Category: Essay
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More Questions than Answers
I did it. I really did it. This essay marks the finish line, the accomplishment of a goal, the completion of a commitment I made one year ago on New Year’s Eve, 2014, when I, with the help of my two tech-savvy and very creative daughters, developed a website on Word Press—Cajun Girl in a…
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How Sixteen Pounds Changed My Life
In the fall of 2011, I was driving to work, chatting happily with my car pool. Even though my daughters were both away at college, I ferried two high school girls, family friends of ours, to the neighborhood where I teach so they could walk to their school each morning. One day in the school…
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What’s in a Name?
Michelle Ann Monica Blanchard Ardillo. That’s my full name. In a previous essay I noted my dad’s first suggestion for the name of his first born baby girl was Flossy, after the hurricane in late September of the year I was born. While only a Category 1 hurricane, Flossy caused major beach erosion and flooding…
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The Adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It’s halfway through the second quarter of the school year and I’ve finally reached my favorite part of 8th grade literature, the beginning of an extended unit on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. First we read his short story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, which serves as a warm-up to third quarter when we take…
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The Harsh Reality of Truth
A few years ago, on “club picture day”, my good friend and colleague stood with me and the students in the after-school club that we jointly moderate to take our photo for the yearbook. Weeks later, the photos arrived and we were each given our copy. Later that day, when we were looking at the…
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What’s It Like Being the Mother of the Pied Piper
After graduation, I decided to stay in the town where I had lived and attended college for four years. I started working for a Kelly Girls temp agency and eventually landed a full-time position as a receptionist at a busy downtown law firm. At the end of the summer, my younger brother, Tommy, moved into…
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The Scariest Drive Home Ever
When I first started driving alone in a car my father told me some basic things to always remember. Never drive on an empty tank. Get your oil checked regularly. Be sure your tires have air in them. Don’t fiddle with the radio or air conditioning while you are driving. Don’t drive through bad sections…
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The Nitty Gritty of Grammar
My eighth grade students took an English quiz on Friday. This came after a solid week of “reviewing” the basic rules of punctuation and capitalization: the comma, the period, the colon, the semicolon, the exclamation point, the question mark, the dash and the hyphen, and when to use quotation marks and italics. All of these…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 