Educating Esmé (15 page)

His speech comes on the heels of a dinner conversation I had with my neighbor, a first-year principal in a Northeast school district where her rural/suburban community students scored remarkably high on the state's new student proficiency test. So three weeks ago
the chairman of the State Board of Education “honored” them with an inspection visit.

According to my neighbor, the chairman arrived in a limousine and largely ignored the warm welcome from students and teachers. He strode through the middle and elementary classrooms for two hours like Napoleon himself, avoided eye contact with one and all, pronounced ringing fault with student spelling and penmanship, and won the following citation from the metropolitan newspaper photographer assigned to the visit: “That was the rudest public performance I have seen in all my years at this job!”

It is people like these—the governor, the chairman of the state school board—whose press conferences too often set the tone for the public debate on education. One must wonder: Has either one of these people ever taught a class? If so, how long ago? Was it university level, high school, junior high, elementary, rural, inner-city, or affluent suburban? How often have they visited a modern classroom, arriving sans entourage or limousine and sitting as an observer of real live teaching and learning?

One must also wonder what they would think of
this book,
Educating Esmé
—if they could find the time to read it. Surely they would be shocked, as would most critics of the modern classroom. For one thing, Madame Esmé's bullet-holed classroom is so unlike the one in which “they” were taught. The buildings have changed, the students have changed, the parents have changed, the administrators have changed, but, nonetheless, the teachers and test scores aren't supposed to change.

I wonder how the all-knowing governor and chairman would have handled Esmé's challenges:

• when Twanette's mother confided that she was six months behind in the belt whippings of her naughty child but resolved to get ahead of schedule that night;

• when Esmé must purchase her own classroom library if students are to have anything but textbooks yet is faced with how to prevent theft by children who don't own a single book;

• when her field-trip bus is stoned by a neighborhood gang as the principal looks on passively from his office window;

• when she is told that black children cannot be taught like white children;

• when the morning's national anthem needs more than the monotonously unfeeling treatment it's been given for four consecutive classroom years;

• when the vice principal suggests Esmé help her move household furniture after school;

• when a fifth-grader brings her two-year-old brother to school for the day because there's no one at home except an abusive father who's under house-arrest.

Granted, the governor and the chairman might have been able to solve some of those problems—even as twenty-four-year-olds, but could they have solved them with the ingenuity, the panache, the élan of Esmé? Would either of them have invented a “time machine” for their classroom? Would they have confronted the obscenely macho principal or knuckled-under out of self-preservation?

Educating Esmé
is not for the naive, the faint of heart, or the born-again idealist. It is not a how-to-teach book. Rather, it's a painfully candid, often inspiring
personal accounting by a first-year teacher of thirty-one Chicago fifth-graders. And because it's a personal diary, the emotional content has not been prettied up for publication. The author lets all the linen hang out, the clean with the dirty. In her classroom, she confesses to moving within minutes from being a loving den mother to a child-devouring dragon. Yet even as a dragon, Esmé devours uniquely. She consumes her pupils with wit, threats, music, poetry, pouts, compliments, and—always, daily—literature.

Even more refreshing in a book about education, the author is not some professorial pedagogue steeped in the wisdom sifted from forty years in academia. She is young, rash, exuberant, alternately innocent and street-wise, always child-wise, and sometimes irrational. But she is
never
irrelevant.

Educating Esmé
is terribly relevant to where we are in American education, behind the desk and in front of the desk, in the home and in the office.

Some would have us believe that only a return to the “good old days” of rote learning can produce the test results needed in today's society. So for all her
brazenness with the curriculum, what, in the end, were the results when Esmé's troop of thirty-one renegades took the Iowa Standardized Test of Basic Skills? How effective were her electronic quiz games, the marshmallow castle, the bubbles festival, and the sushi menu? That's for you, the reader, to think about, and, please God, all the governors and school board chairs, too.

—Jim Trelease

I would like to thank the following people, who have been so instrumental in my teaching and writing: Jim Pollock; my parents, Barry and Betty Codell and Florence and André Pollock; my grandparents, Isidore, Rosalie, Evelyn, and Seymour; Robin Robinson; Ron Saiet; Rochelle Cueto; Elyse Martin; Heather Cella; Patti Taylor; Reggie Codell; Carrie Codell; Constance A. Roberts; David Newman; Andy Laties; Tom Caplan; Reverend Sheila Goggin; Sarah Packer; Betty Sitbon; Lana Nieves; Carol Aubot of the Aldrich Public Library in Barre, Vermont; Ann Miller; Cyril Ritchard; Conrack; Garrison Keillor; Jim Trelease; Caroline Feller Bauer; and my insightful and encouraging editor, Amy Gash. A special thanks to all the hard-working Chicago Public School teachers and aides and the children who make my days so interesting. A debt of gratitude to the memories of Constance Schultz, my angel, and Ismene Siteles, a teacher's teacher.

HIT THE GROUND RUNNING

Designers of Possibility

Advice for Aspiring and New Elementary School Teachers

New Teacher Shopping List

At the risk of sounding like a teacher, I have to say it: the end of a book is not always the end of a story. For several years that followed the one described in
Educating Esmé
, I stayed on with the Chicago Public Schools. I came to love my job as a school librarian. In this role as another kind of educator, I savored meeting with all of the children in the school, reading aloud every day and, most of all, sharing so much information, so many beautiful visions of the way the world can be, so many reasons to laugh and cry and think and believe and build. Authors and illustrators forge otherwise impossible connections across time and space and between people, and the creators of such books are symbiotically joined with teachers as designers of possibility. I came to recognize that children's literature is our country's best hope for equalizing education, because a great book in the hands of a rich child is the same great book in the hands of a poor child. I also recognized that being the catalyst for this connection between children and artists was a very sacred trust and that it was what I wanted to do for a living. More than that, it was what I wanted to do for a life.

I was also fortunate enough to eventually work for and with many diligent and humane administrators—people who filled their positions instead of letting their
positions fill them. This underscored for me how important it is for teachers to make changes and take initiatives that support their own survival within school systems. I am so glad I didn't believe people who said things were the same everywhere or that my expectations weren't realistic. Things are the way we make them to be.

And so, how are we going to make them to be? Some teachers treat their classrooms like science labs, some treat them like business offices, and others as art studios in which they join the children in painting a picture of a perfect year. I like to imagine what classrooms and curricula might look like in the future and what skills and knowledge elementary school children are going to need: subjects like environmental science, global studies, computer science, and media literacy; and with the resurgence of the “DIY” (“do-it-yourself”) crafts movement and the need for America to manufacture again, utilitarian classes like home economics, shop, and even the fine and applied arts may yet make a comeback in urban schools.

After
Educating Esmé
came out, I resigned my school position in order to work on other projects and realize other dreams, including national advocacy for literature-based learning and read-aloud. I homeschooled my son through a crucial year, taught full time in a private, progressive setting, wrote several novels for preteen readers, and started the PlanetEsmé Bookroom, an independent venture in
Chicago, in which I opened a storefront resource collection of about twelve thousand children's books and offered free programming to my community.

Some of the most personally rewarding work I have done has been with new teachers and teachers-in-training. They still walk that line between the nuts and bolts of teaching and the dream; they are still negotiating between what they personally have to offer and what is required of them. In one exercise, I asked teachers-to-be to visualize and draw the environment that most reflected what they had to share. After some egging-on—and permission to really fantasize—they described classrooms with desk arrangements around koi ponds. With toadstools instead of desks. With basketball nets. Or sometimes, the thought of a sink, a new bulletin board, some patched drywall, or a working bulb for an overhead projector was enough to inspire a reverie. It's funny how so little can go so far in a classroom. Teachers have always made the best and most out of what they're given. Never mind making a silk purse out of a sow's ear; give a good teacher a sow's ear, and she can make a Fendi bag. So imagine what a teacher can do with something better than a sow's ear?

This courage to dream about the classroom and their role in the lives of children is what I hope both new and veteran teachers have taken from reading my diary. Whatever battles we choose, whether the classroom is indeed
an office or lab or art studio or zoo or enchanted forest or basketball court, we are always designers of possibility. Whether we are old-fashioned or newfangled, I hope teachers can think big enough and manifest their visions in ways that encourage children to believe in the American Dream; and by that I don't mean a house, a dog, and two-and-a-half children; I mean the reward of bringing what you imagine to fruition, the promise that we are telling the truth to children when we say, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” And to them, it will be utterly realistic, because we will have done it first.

I am often asked for helpful hints and survival tactics for the first year of teaching, the choicest of which I have compiled here. The biggest mistake new teachers make is underestimating their own role in preparation. Even excellent and thorough teacher training can never cover all the bases; there has to be some independent effort in order to hit the ground running. Most of this effort involves collecting information and materials, envisioning, and planning. The further in advance you begin, the better.

1. Be congenial to the custodian and to the school secretary.
That's actually an age-old “word to the wise.” Office clerks and custodial engineers have unique insights and wield a lot of power in the building. Operations can screech to a halt when these folks aren't happy. Be as concerned about making a professional impression on support staff as you would be about impressing administrators.

2. Think about why you are a teacher in terms of what you have to share.
If you teach because you “love children,” well,
that doesn't always get you through the days when the children's behavior seems a little less than lovable. If you are motivated instead by what you can
impart
, that can really shift your teaching into overdrive. Maybe you enjoy traveling or cooking or dancing or playing the guitar or solving mysteries. Maybe you are an enthusiast of poetry or history or sports or architecture; whatever it is, integrate it into your classroom environment and your curriculum. That seems really basic, but it's so easy to get caught up in mandates, textbook objectives, and the desire to please others that you forget what brought you to the classroom in the first place. Infuse your teaching with your unique passions and personality—that's what will make you a teacher the students will always remember and what will help inspire your students to follow your lead, embracing life and becoming true learners. It can also encourage you to keep pursuing outside interests, nurturing the kind of inner balance that will help to fend off teacher burnout.

3. Interview the school.
When you are trying to land a job, you'll be trying to make a good first impression, but keep in mind that you have a right to ask questions, too, and you
should
ask questions to make sure that you are starting out at a place that will offer you the professional scaffolding you need as a new teacher. Some questions you might ask are, “What does your school do specifically to support professional
development?” “What are the class sizes, and how have they fluctuated?” “Can you tell me a little bit more about the student population and the level of parent involvement?” A good principal will appreciate a few sincere inquiries and will not become defensive. Visit the school's website and online resources before the interview to acquire a general sense of the academic focus and the particulars of the population. Exploring classroom websites created by teachers within the building will reveal a lot about the energy of the people who work there, whether teacher collaboration and parent communication are priorities, and what sort of technology and other resources might be available to you if you join the team.