About Mr. Broaddus
Mr. Broaddus is a 2009 graduate of Millikin University (Decatur, IL) with a Bachelor of Arts in English – Secondary Education and an additional middle school endorsement. He is married to a lovely lady named Courtney, and they have two boys, Christian and Emerson. At various times in his life, Mr. Broaddus has been a performing musician, composer, techie, web designer/programmer, journalist (sort of), and writer; he hopes now to combine any of a variety of these interests with his love of learning and facilitating intellectual and personal growth in his students. He loves reading & writing about language, reading & writing about teaching, reading & writing about reading & writing, and reading & writing in general. (For more on Mr. Broaddus’ personal writing, see here.)
As an educator, Mr. Broaddus is greatly interested in the following subjects: No Child Left Behind reform; current assessment practices, especially standardized testing; writing theory and pedagogy; the role of grammar instruction in writing; increasing the importance of language studies in the language arts classroom; assisting English Language Learner/English as a Second Language (ELL/ESL) students with fluency and language acquisition; the effectiveness of music as a medium for appreciation of literature; and a variety of other subjects. (For more on Mr. Broaddus’ personal educational philosophy, see here.)
As a lover of literature, Mr. Broaddus is a fan of the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, most of the modernist poets (but not Wallace Stevens so much), Allen Ginsberg, and the Harlem Renaissance poets (including but not limited to Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Claude McKay), a fan of the classic fiction of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, William Faulkner, James Joyce (and most of the modernist writers), and the short fiction of Thomas Pynchon (since he hasn’t had the intestinal fortitude to stick out one of his longer works yet), and a fan of other more contemporary fiction such as that of John Green and Jodi Picoult (but definitely not Stephenie Meyer).
As a lover of language, Mr. Broaddus is a fan of and would love to learn more of the Romance languages, Latin, and Greek.
For more detailed information on Mr. Broaddus’ professional and academic history, see his curriculum vitae. For more information about Mr. Broaddus’ current projects, see the projects page.