Tag: teacher
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Book Review: Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger
Everyone knows the saying, “Like mother, like daughter,” or “Like father, like son.” We all inherit certain traits and characteristics from our parents and pass on some of them to our own children. In my case, though, it is more like, “Like father, like daughter.” My father was a first-class storyteller. Sometimes they started out…
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Book Review(s?): The Rom-Commers and Hello, Stranger by Katherine Center
A colleague of mine recommended a book to me at the start of this school year, Hello, Stranger by Katherine Center. She said it was one of her favorites and that I should read it. So, in December, I did. And I liked it. It was about something I didn’t know anything about, face blindness,…
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In the Silence
Silence. As a former middle school teacher, I have often thought, “How can you hear me if you are talking?” Or, “Weren’t you listening? I just explained how to do this.” As adults and educational professionals who spend all day in noisy, busy classrooms, is it possible for even us to listen and talk at…
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Another Kind of Break
I’ve been writing regularly, but my last post here was about how impatient I was for Thanksgiving Break. I recounted how I had spent the summer in a boot due to a bad break, a broken ankle. I just couldn’t wait for five whole days in a row off from school and being free to…
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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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Carbs: 6, Me: 0
We are nearing the end of the first quarter of 2017. Before I became a teacher, the end of the quarter meant additional stress to get commercial real estate leasing agreements negotiated and signed. Now that I’m a middle school language arts teacher, the end of the quarter means essays and tests to grade, report…
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The Art of Creating
One week ago today I posted my last essay in my “essay a week for one year” project that I started on New Year’s Eve 2014. At the time of posting my last essay “More Questions than Answers”, I was unsure of my next step for my Cajun Girl in a Kilt website. Shortly after…
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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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Love Never Fails
It’s midday Sunday and I am just sitting down to write this week’s essay. It’s been a busy weekend. Friday night was the wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner for one of my colleagues, a third grade teacher at my school. Months ago, after announcing her engagement, she stopped me as I was coming in to…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 