Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year

Esme is twenty-four when she takes her first teaching job. Young and enthusiastic, her passion for storytelling, art and theater shine through in all her instructional efforts. Social justice is a concern for her. She is bothered by the consistently-lower expectations her students face simply because they are people of color. She is also bothered by the apparent sexism of the school principal and the condescending tone of board-approved “experts” hired to teach teachers what to do in their classrooms.

As a teacher, Esme creates her own rules, often giving students more power than her colleagues might. She puts them in charge of their reading groups and weekly peer mediation. She makes activities as participatory and tactile as possible, whether it is making a quilt comprised of state flowers, going into book time machines or staging fairy tales for younger grades.

She listens to her students talk of their hardships and tries as best she can to understand them and to keep them safe. She offers students love when they act their most unlovable. She attempts to uncover the reasons why they lie, steal or act out. She laments the near ubiquity of