Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year

Once the school opens and the academic year begins, Esme is excited to set up her classroom. She puts great care into selecting materials that she thinks will please her students—both visually-stimulating messages meant to encourage them and enjoyable, tactile materials for them to use to build and create. The school year gets off to a positive start. She notices the challenges many of her students experience when attempting to read aloud so she tells her class they are going to review the alphabet under the guise of presenting the information later to the kindergarten. She also renames the subjects (math becomes “puzzling,” science becomes “mad sciencing,” social studies becomes “time travel and world exploring” and reading becomes “free reading”) so as to counteract any pre-conceived notions that the students might have about the subject and their abilities in that area. Esme puts a lot of time and energy into the emotional health of her students. Conflict mediation, led by the students, becomes a weekly feature of her classroom. Additionally, she begins each school day by greeting each student personally and collecting their worries in her Trouble Basket. She has students write in their journal regularly, in order to express their feelings, and asks them to reflect on books that encourage empathy and cultural understanding.

As the school year continues, she gets to know her students better and becomes more acquainted with the challenges they face outside of school. Shira, who is Filipino, speaks little English and needs help connecting with her peers. Esther, who is Haitian, transfers in from another school. Though Ms. Coil, the vice principal, tells Esme that Esther has a reputation for fighting, Esme is open-minded and finds Esther lively and bright (though she does have to contact her family when Esther begins putting voodoo spells on her peers).

Esme’s first interactions with parents are fraught with difficulty. When Esme speaks to Twanette’s mother about pencils that Twanette stole from a friend, Esme is horrified by the response: Twanette’s mom’s emphatically promises to take Twanette home and beat her with a belt. After a prized comic book Esme brought from home is stolen, she packs up the extra books she was using in lieu of the standard reading material and has a meeting with a parent—Valerie’s mom—who demands that Esme brings the books back out. Another parent—Asha’s mom— complains about Esme telling the kids they should own dictionaries.

Holidays are special events that require much preparation in Madame Esme’s class. The kids write spooky stories for Halloween and decorate pumpkins and have a mummy-wrapping contest. They perform a zydeco song for the Holiday show. Other special events include a book reading and signing with Connie Porter, an author from the American Girls series. When an expensive doll is raffled off and a male student wins, Esme intervenes before Mr. Turner can take it out of the hands of the winning student. Esme also arranges for science projects that involve the actual use of fire (though with an extinguisher at hand) and the drawing of student self-portraits as favorite Greek gods and goddesses.

Esme and Mr. Turner continue to spar over her name. Turner tries to insist that she be called Mrs. Cordell but she refuses and threatens to contact the union and ACLU. Esme attempts to explain to the children why the name matters to her, detailing the history of the appellation Mrs. and Ms., and privately reflects on her own childhood experiences growing up in the inner city, where she encountered prostitutes and madams whom she admired for their bravado, despite their hardships. She refuses to change her name or her teaching style, even when Mr. Turner criticizes her. She also refuses to stand on the sideline and goes further into the lives of students in the school, breaking up fights and confronting an eighth-grade gang member. As she tells Mr. Turner, “I don’t work for you. I work for the children” (52).