Tag: middle school
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Shielding our Differences
The summer before my first year of full-time teaching in middle school literature and English, I looked over the textbooks I would be using. As a second-career teacher with no formal education courses behind me, I had no idea how to plan a unit, but I knew how to read and analyze a piece of…
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Cross on Over to Nerdy Book Club!
After teaching The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, I wrote about the experience–and and the man behind it–for Nerdy Book Club. Please read it here and let me know your thoughts!
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Who’s Your Favorite?
These “top 10 of this” and “favorite 5 of that” lists are very popular these days. Someone is always posting a list of these types of things on Facebook: list your favorite book (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier), favorite song (“Your Song” by Elton John), favorite color (pink), favorite day of the week (Sunday), favorite…
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#LeaningintoLent
It’s Lent, and I’m a Catholic school teacher. That means I bring my faith and religion to work with me every day, and I bring my work to my faith and religion every day. At my school, we talk about our Catholic faith a lot, in all classes-not just in religion class. My middle school…
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A New Year, A New Me
A new school year has begun, and week two is in the books, or grade books as it were. However, my school year began a day late, due to a back injury that sidelined me for the first day of school. Calling in sick has never been easy for me; I was even more…
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The Sun Came Out This Weekend – Again
The Broadway smash hit musical Annie has a special place in my heart. In the summer of 1987, I met my husband while playing the role of Mrs. Greer in a summer stock production of Annie, working backstage also as assistant director/stage manager. We began dating during that production and after twenty-eight years, it’s safe…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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A Week Down Memory Lane
Once the school year begins, and the “train” leaves the station, it seems like I don’t have any time, inclination, or energy for a big project around the house. For ten months I struggle with the enormous piles of essays, tests, and quizzes that befall a middle school language arts teacher. About all I can…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 