Tag: English

• Color My World

  Recently I was reading the latest issue of Writer’s Digest magazine when I came across an interview with Drew Daywalt, who was featured on the cover. I had not yet heard of him (sorry, Mr. Daywalt) but the image of his two children’s books on the first page of the article caught my eye so…

  michardillo

  January 10, 2016

  Essay

  Catholic school, children’s literature, chocolates, crayons, Drew Daywalt, Emerson College, English, Forrest Gump, Hollywood, Howard Gardner, John Mayer, language arts, Life is like a box of chocolates, literature, middle school, multiple intelligences, Nerdy Book Club, Oliver Jeffers, screenwriting, teaching, The Day the Crayons Quit, Tom Hanks, Writer’s Digest, writing

• 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…

  michardillo

  October 25, 2015

  Essay

  comma, eighth grade, English, exclamation point, foreign language, grammar, HSPT, italics, middle school, period, professional development, punctuation, question mark, quotation marks, semicolon, teacher

• Drowning, But Don’t Save Me — Yet

  At the annual Back to School Night last week I introduced myself to the parents of my 7th graders with my usual background information: “This is my 9th year teaching and my 9th year at this school. I came to education as a second career after twenty years in the legal field. After leaving my…

  michardillo

  September 20, 2015

  Essay

  back to school, Belgium, creativity, English, grading, international school, language arts, library, middle school, reading, real estate, retired, retirement, St. John’s International School, teaching, theatre, Waterloo, writing

• Grace on the Field

  As many of you know, I teach middle school language arts in a Catholic school located in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC. Yes, I spend all day with pre-teens and teens, awash in adolescent hormones, Axe body spray, egg-shaped lip gloss containers, and poor grammar brought on by texting and IM’ing.  Six periods a…

  michardillo

  May 10, 2015

  Essay

  100 metre, 400 metres, athelete, English, Eric Liddell, Flying Scotsman, football, language arts, literature, middle school, Olympics, sports, teacher, teaching, track