Educating Esmé

Diary of a Teacher's First Year

EXPANDED EDITION

Esmé Raji Codell

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

To Jim

Foreword

PART I

PART II

PART III

EPILOGUE

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Teachers' Guide: Hit the Ground Running

My grandmother liked to say, “Be sweet my child, and let who will be clever.” Obviously Esmé Raji Codell never had my grandmother's dictum drummed into her young ears. As I read her diary, I found her intelligence, energy, and imagination thrilling but, unable to escape my grandmother's long reach from the grave, was from time to time alarmed by Madame Esmé's acerbic honesty. Indeed, sometimes she scared the living daylights out of me. I kept remembering my first year of teaching. At the time I fancied myself a rather daring young teacher, but what was there to fear?

The principal hardly ever made the descent from his front office to my solitary basement classroom at the rear of the school. He never caught us with the desks shoved against the walls doing broad jumps
the length of the room or reading
Macbeth
instead of the language arts text. Even if he had, I think he would have been mildly amused. But let's face it, compared to Esmé, I was a staid traditionalist. I never roller-skated down the halls, never swapped places for a day with my most troublesome student. It never occurred to me to teach math by means of the cha-cha or give delightful new names to tired old subject designations. And I never asked anyone, much less the principal, to call me “Madame.” No one, not even I, knew if I had had a successful day in that basement classroom, unlike Esmé, who, on February 7, rejoices over her students' depth of understanding at the culmination of their unit on Native Americans, and then proceeds to say: “Like every successful day, it seems, it ended by getting called into the office.”

Esmé is an original. There is, alas, no way to clone her. More ominously, she is exactly the kind of teacher who is all too often so scary to the status quo that she is under constant threat of dismissal or, at the very least, is always having her differences questioned.

Are we then simply to read this book with delight and then close it with a sigh? After all, it was first published
to glowing reviews in 1999 when No Child Left Behind (including its grimmer unintended consequences) wasn't yet a gleam in a bureaucrat's eye. Today so many creative and devoted teachers not only have to struggle against unimaginative administrations, fearful parents, and wearied colleagues, they have also to battle entire legislative bodies that have never taught a child yet dare to equate educational success or failure with the ability of fourth graders to choose one out of four given answers to mind-numbing questions that have nothing to do with the joy of literature or the elegance of math. How could a penciled-in circle on an answer sheet reveal a child's delight in the amazing stories of people in the past? Is there anything on that sheet that would show how this child had come to marvel at the mysteries of the universe? Can a standardized test show that a student has been led to wonder how everything, including her own body, is put together? Too many teachers have said to me that they can no longer really teach. They must spend all their time preparing their students for “the test.” By demanding that teachers teach “to the test” or to some narrow, proscribed curriculum, we have lost many of our brightest and best.

Esmé is unique, so what help is she to those struggling in an alien climate to be successful teachers? She gives us a clue in the argument she has with the board of education workshop leader, in which she speaks to “closed-door teacher anarchy.” She is right when she says that nobody knows what is happening after the teacher closes the door. “At worst, mediocrity. At best, miracles.” A prefabricated curriculum could help the mediocre teacher, she says, by giving him or her a script to follow. On the other hand, it could operate as “benign suggestions” to the truly good teacher.

So much of teaching, she reminds us, is sharing. “You can't test what sort of teacher someone will be, because testing what someone knows isn't the same as what someone is able to share. This will be different for every teacher.” And then she goes on to say, “I am operating from a position where I am personally vested in my approach, which any teacher will tell you is a privileged place to be. Does being personally vested make a teacher successful? Not necessarily. Does it make a teacher accountable? Absolutely.”

Madame Esmé has shared with us her idiosyncratic teaching and learning as a first-year teacher.
The often unhappy administration was impressed—and I dare say, surprised—when the Iowa tests revealed that every student had advanced at least a year, and some two or three years. So by the penciled-in-circle measurement she was a successful teacher. But no one reading this book will conclude that her students' test scores were the only, or even the most important, measure of her success. Her fifth-graders wrote that assessment on the scarf they presented to her on their final day. Madame Esmé cried when she read their words, and so did I.

—Katherine Paterson

To: fifth-grade beginniners
From: Melanie, fifth-grader

I know what your thinking your thinking that going to the fifth grade is going to be fun and not hard well I got something to tell you. You got to know every thing. you have to know your devition your time tables know how to do the dowy dowy decimal sistem. There are a lot of book she have read this year like
The Hundred Dresses
by Eleanor Estes,
Greek Myths, Helen Keller, The Bat-Poet
by Randall Jarrell and . . . and . . . you would find out the rest when you get here. you can not say shut up and you must follow the golden rule and you can not talk in the hall and you must not talk back at the teacher well I think that is anouf to let you know about the 5th grade life. Ta ta . . .

Ismene died. That's where I'll start, because it's with Ismene that my real teaching started.

I cried when I found out. I tried to go to her memorial—I mean, I went—but it was all in Greek, and everybody crossing themselves made me nervous. I couldn't really concentrate on remembering Ismene, her sharp eyes, like a sparrow. She was my guide. I would not be a teacher without her.

I'm not quite a teacher yet—that is, I haven't had a class of my own. That's in September, if I last and if the new school opens on time. I'm surprised Mr. Turner hired me, only twenty-four years old, to help him open a brand-new public school. You would
think he would want someone more experienced. The interview was very brief. He asked, “How would you describe your classroom discipline style?”

I answered, “Assertive.”

He said, “What does that mean?”

“It means I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” I replied.

“Well, say you're having a problem with a student, how would you deal with it?”

“I would document the child's behavior and then try interventions such as using successive approximations toward our goal or home involvement, depending on the individual situation,” I explained. After a silence, I added, “I wouldn't call the office every five minutes.”

He closed the little notebook on his lap and announced, “You're hired.”

I had to go through a perfunctory interview with a panel that asked silly questions like, “What would you do if a child were to say ‘fuck' in your classroom?”

“Faint dead away!” I put my hand to my forehead.

“What kind of classroom environment will you create?”

“Do you mean the physical, emotional, or educational environment?”

“I guess I don't know.”

“Then I guess I don't know how to answer you,” I confessed, “but I'll offer examples of each . . .”

I was teary-eyed the whole cab ride home, thinking that I must not really want the job, to answer questions in such a cavalier manner! Why wasn't I more polite? Me and my big mouth! etc. But when I got home, there was a message from Mr. Turner: “They loved you!”

So now here I am, typing, copying, answering phones, “being flexible,” as Mr. Turner calls it. I think that means doing things you're not supposed to do for longer than you ever thought you'd have to do them.

Tomorrow Mr. Turner says I should come see the graduation ceremonies at the school where he was vice-principal. They must be planning to make a hot dog out of him—I can't imagine why he'd let me stop typing for a minute, unless it was to bear witness to his glory.

I was right about the ceremony. There was another assembly, with all of the children who were coming to the new school. I approached Mr. Turner. “If you have an intention of introducing me, would you please call me Ms. Esmé rather than Mrs. Codell?”

I was surprised at how my request surprised him.

He said, “That's against board policy.”

Not having been born yesterday, I replied that in all the other classrooms I had worked in, that is what the children called me.

He seemed bemused. “But it's not your legal name.” He smiled helplessly.

“Certainly it is.”

“Your
last
name.”

“Let's pretend . . . I haven't got a last name. I'll be like . . . Sade.”

He laughed heartily at this, and I laughed too, but then he said, “Well, I think we'll call you Mrs. Cordell.” The way he mispronounces my last name makes me wince.

“You can call me what you like.” I smiled and tried
to maintain a pleasant tone. “But we will see what name I answer to.” We made eye contact. He turned away and mumbled something about “women's libbers.”

He introduced me as Ms. Esmé. I felt uncomfortable. I didn't mean to be confrontational, but I think I should be able to decide what name I answer to. Mr. Turner is well-intentioned, but it is not enough. He is not clever, he is not intelligent. At least not to me.

I
WROTE A
proposal for a schoolwide Fairy Tale Festival. Mr. Turner approved it, but he said the idea has to first go through administrators, teachers, and community members. I showed my idea to the librarian-to-be. She was skeptical. That's typical. If you give people an idea these days, they just think you are sharing it with them so they can critique it, play devil's advocate, and so on. It doesn't occur to them that they might help or get enthused or at least have the courtesy to get out of your way. Sometimes this frustrates me, but I try deep inside to move beyond it. Sometimes I think,
Why invent projects? What is the point? How will I ever accomplish what I set out to do, what I imagine?
Then I think
of the past, even before I was born, the great small feats people accomplished. I think of things like Mary Martin washing her hair onstage in
South Pacific
, or the Kungsholm puppet operas with sixty puppets onstage at once, or the palace built by the postman in France, or the circus I saw in Copenhagen where a woman wore a coat of live minks, or any of the things I enjoy and value, and I think:
Those people had to work to accomplish those things, they thought of details, they followed through.
Even if I come off as naive and zealous, even if I get on everyone's nerves, I have to follow these examples. Even if I fail, I have to try and try and try. It may be exhausting, but that is beside the point. The goal is not necessarily to succeed but to keep trying, to be the kind of person who has ideas and see them through.

We'll see. I aim too high, probably. But if I don't aim, how will I hit anywhere near the target?

I hereby attach a copy of what I expect to be a most interesting curiosity, the crowning jewel of my
naiveté: my Fairy Tale Festival proposal. Perhaps I will look back on this and think, as I was most condescendingly informed yesterday at the Friends of the School Library Committee meeting (which I organized, by the way, after it was explained to me that a committee needed to be invented because a committee needs to exist to approve a proposal), that it was not realistic to do, as I would surely have known had I been teaching awhile. I said everything I proposed I was willing to coordinate, that I just needed help on the actual day of the festival to supervise for the children's safety. The vice-principal, Ms. Coil, said no, everything should be a group effort. Then, as a group, they decided they didn't want to put forth the effort. So, the end. Some of my favorite sections: