Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year

“That’s typical. If you give people an idea these days, they just think you are sharing 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.”

Esme shares her Fairy Tale Festival idea with the school librarian and is heartily disappointed by the reaction she receives. Esme isn’t looking for critique or even approval. She would like assistance but mostly she wants to share her excitement and offer others the opportunity to get onboard, if they want in on the idea.

“I was carried away with the idea of infinite possibility. The same sense of infinite possibility, from the sour expressions on the faces of my cohorts, that would compel someone to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. All that is really necessary, after all, is a little ‘volunteerism and imagination.’”

Esme would like to inspire her fellow teachers and prove how much they can accomplish if they put some real faith in their new ideas. When Esme offers up some of her own, however, her colleagues look baffled and irritated by the suggestions.

“If he were the sort of person who ever said thank you for anything I would say poor man, lonely man. People who don’t say thank you, people who ask ‘What do I think?’, people who call people on the phone after a twelve hour workday, people who talk behind people’s backs, well, maybe there’s a reason they are lonely.”

At the start of their relationship, Esme makes an effort to connect with Mr. Turner. She is initially tolerant when he asks her personal questions, seeing it as a sign of his personal loneliness. But when he calls her at home with additional questions and additional work, she begins to think that he is a poor candidate for pity. Though he would like to be understood and respected, he refuses to do the same for others.

“Thanks to her generous advice and allowances, I enter my profession with excitement instead of trepidation, and the understanding that really I have no right to indulge in a lack of confidence. It would only interfere with the task before me.”

Of the many lessons she received from Ismene, the one that Esme perhaps values most of all is the need for self-confidence in teaching. According to Ismene, worrying about one’s self is futile, if the goal is to really teach. The focus should not be on the instructor but on the student, and what they need to successfully learn.

“I tried to make pleasant conversation. I asked him how he came to be a principal. He said the Vietnam War was going on and he felt a black man would be stupid to fight for this country so he went to college instead. He changed his major from drama to administration so they wouldn’t draft him. Then he asked if I was going to marry my boyfriend. I said I felt that was kind of personal and that was the end of pleasant conversation.”

Esme is curious to learn more about who Mr. Turner is and what makes him tick. She wants to know how he ended up in his current position and his answer reveals other, earlier life ambitions. This conversation comes to an abrupt end when Turner makes Esme uncomfortable by asking about her love life, instead of talking more about what she imagines to be their shared passion for teaching. 

“When we were all assembled, it was apparent that there was a disproportionate amount of twenty something slender white girls wearing short, albeit, professional skirts […] Tonight, I figured out what it is that we might have to offer.”

Esme is already suspicious of Mr. Turner’s views of women from their first few conversations together. When she notices the type of women he calls back for interviews, she detects a clear pattern. It is obvious that Mr. Turner prioritizes physical attractiveness in the female teachers that keep him company all day.

“We don’t call the subjects the old fashioned names in Room 211. Math is “Puzzling,’ science is “Mad Scientist Time,” social studies is “T.T.W.E.” which stands for “Time Traveling and World Exploring,” language arts is “Art of Language” and reading is “Free Reading Time.”

Esme realizes that by fifth grade, many students already have preset notions about where their talents lie. They are quick to profess themselves good or bad at certain subjects. Because of this tendency, Esme decides to rename all the subjects, to make them both unfamiliar and exciting to students so they can have a fresh start with all of the material.

“New girl, Esther, from Haiti. Dark, eyes darting, frightened. ‘She’s got a record of fighting from her other school,’ Ms. Coil explained. Who asked her?”

Esme endeavors to get to know her students without preconceived notions and to find the best in all of them. She is annoyed when Ms. Coil presents a new student with the disclaimer that this girl is a trouble maker. Esme is determined to see her in a fresh light and in fact does forge a positive relationship with Esther by immediately according her respect.

“She assured me that she would whip Twanette with a belt at home, adding apologetically that she usually whips Twanette every six months but she’s been behind schedule.”

Esme is floored by how casually parents admit to beating their kids. Esme called Twanette’s mother in to talk in the hope of getting to the bottom of why Twanette was taking a peer’s school supplies. It is clear from this conversation, however, that Twanette’s mother is not open to discussion or behavior modification.

“So the next day, with teacher permission, I confronted Perry, the one boy I recognized. ‘I know nothing’s going to happen to you for what you did last night,’ I said, ‘but I want you to know that I saw what you did and I didn’t like it.’”

When Esme takes her class on a field trip to a university science fair for kids, their bus is briefly waylaid by gang members, who throw rocks at the windows. Esme recognizes one of the gang members, an eighth grader named Perry. The next day she confronts him about it at school and to her surprise, he becomes emotional and repentant as she reminds him that what he did was evil and could hurt younger students.

“Esther is really doing very well. During Free Reading Time, she pores over Betsy-Tacy  and Mysterious Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen of the Mississippi, a book I picked up in New Orleans. Ester is my secret favorite.”

Esme decides she needs to talk with Esther’s parents when Esther begins threatening to put voodoo spells on her classmates, upsetting them. But rather than outlawing the material, Esme lends her a book and makes her promise to end the threats. By encouraging her passion, rather than forbidding it, Esther continues to blossom into a gifted reader and student.

“Certain people think it’s their job to freak out. As long as they are freaking out, they feel busy [and] like they must be doing work. Getting upset is force but no motion. Unless we are moving forward, we aren’t doing work.”

When Esme decides to surprise her students by showing up in rolling skates one day, she encounters the consternation of Mr. Turner, who finds the idea ridiculous and dangerous. Esme decides it is probably best to keep other practices—such as a science magic show that involves setting paper on fire in a bottle—a secret from the administration. She knows they would not permit anything that might be controversial in any way, and would feel justified in censoring her.

“It dawned on me, what that homophobic backward idiot was about to do. He wanted to redraw a name until he got a girl! After all these weeks of work, he was going to put a damper on my event. Don’t even, a voice screamed inside my head.”

Esme is furious when Mr. Turner almost disturbs the pleasant proceedings of an event she arranged, featuring an American Girls series author. When a boy wins the doll raffle, Mr. Turner is ready to take the prize from the chosen student. Esme intervenes in time, happily, and counteracts Mr. Turner’s outmoded ideas on gender norms.

“I have asked you to refrain from having the children at the school address you as Madame Esme. If you would like the children to refer to you by your first name with the more acceptable title of Ms., Mrs. or Miss I have no objection.”

Esme’s chosen name creates a constant source of friction between her and Mr. Turner. He believes the name is inappropriate—mostly, it seems, because it is odd. Esme refuses to be called anything else, though, and attempts to explain to Mr. Turner that she believes it is important to call people by their preferred names, rather than the names we might want them to go by.

“JoEllen’s mom says there’s a lot less fighting at their house since JoEllen taught them conflict resolution. That was nice to hear!”

Esme feels that her efforts are getting through when she sees her students start to use their conflict-resolution skills among themselves and independently of her. She is even more buoyed when she gets a letter from a parent attesting to the positive influence of conflict resolution skills at home.

“We had our Christmas assembly. It was supposed to be an international theme so I had my kids do a ‘Cajun Christmas.’ I chose a zydeco song in French which translated goes something like ‘My darling, my dear, you little flirt, nobody does it like you do.’ It had nothing to do with Christmas but based on the amount of idiocy I’ve contended with here, I surmised that nobody would notice.”

Esme again tries out her preferred technique of doing what she wants without asking permission when the school holiday celebration rolls around. As long as she does seek permission, no one takes issue with her untraditional choice of song for her students to perform.

“The class was impressed. ‘Write it in your journal before you forget,’ I suggested. ‘Who’s next?’ For the rest of the day, the kids took turns in the time machine. So far, nobody has said, ‘It’s just a box full of books.’”

Esme is able to score a tremendous success with her time machine made out of a refrigerator box. She wonders whether the kids will take the idea seriously but finds that her passion and enthusiasm for the idea has them sold. JoEllen goes in first and reports back that she attended a medieval joust. When this first student decides to authenticate the idea, everyone else follows suit. It eventually gets all the kids excited to read inside the time machine.

“In their private journals, there is a disproportionate number of references to the Klan, considering we live in the city. Zykercia even wrote about a dream where the Klan was riding through the streets of her neighborhood on horses, clad in white sheets. Maybe it’s because some of the kids spent some time down South, I don’t know, but when I compared the Nazis and white supremacists an audible groan of recognition went up.”

Teaching the Holocaust to her students, Esme comes to see how deeply fearful they are of being attacked because of their cultural background. They privately record worries that they will be hunted down simply for being black. This gives Esme terrible insights into what it must have been like for Jews living in Nazi Germany.

“I let Mr. Williams off the hook at the last period of the day, assigning a composition, “The Day Billy Williams Was Our Teacher.” I wrote a composition during the period too, ‘The Day Madame Esme Was Billy Williams.’ At the end of the day, I read it to the class: how I had forgotten how hard it is not to chew gum, what a pain it is to have to go to the washroom with the class when you don’t have to go, how scary it is when you forget to study, how easy it is to feel stupid even if you’re smart. I let Billy have my composition and he took the rest of them home to grade.”

When Billy Williams continues to act out in class, refusing to do any work, Esme decides on an unconventional response: she makes him the teacher for the day. She has him prepare lessons, make copies, take students to the bathroom and lunch room—in essence, do all the things she does in a day. Billy is initially irreverent, then anxious, and then finally confident by the end of the day, when Esme praises him for doing a good job. She asks the students to reflect on how the day went and Esme reflects, as well, on what it was like to again be a student. She validates students’ fears and discomforts by acknowledging that she felt these things, too.

“Draggy things this week: Mr. Turner looking at my breasts. Takes all the joy out of wearing a leotard. Proceeded to ask me to do a schoolwide promotion of milk.”

When Esme catches her boss ogling her breasts, it is further confirmation of her suspicion that Mr. Turner mostly hires female teachers that he is physically attracted to. He apparently is unaware or not self-conscious about this habit of his at all.

“Ha! You call that a fight? You wait until you’ve been teaching in the city awhile. See if you can stay here after you come against the fight, the fight that will prove that Mr. Turner’s just the captain of a sinking ship. The fight that’s bigger than two people in a room. It’s a fight you can’t win even though you’re right because you can’t win it all by yourself.”

Esme isn’t at all sure what her colleague, Ms. Federman, means by “the fight,” which can’t be won but nonetheless has to be faced by all inner-city teachers. Ms. Federman’s point is that Esme’s battle with Mr. Turner over her chosen name is really an argument of little consequence. They are up against much bigger things, forces beyond the control of the teachers and Mr. Turner. Esme doesn’t know what those forces are, but she decides it is worth hanging around to find out.

“I started dancing on the butcher paper, making my feet do the math. Forward, multiply the ones. Back, bring it down. Side, the ones column by the tens. Back, down and over. Side, multiply the tens by the ones. Back, extra steps and over. On and on. Soon, all the kids were dancing on problems.”

In another stroke of inventiveness, Esme decides that her students, struggling with multiplication, need a new way to experience math. Dance, she decides, is the answer. She leads the students in a distributive cha-cha that helps them understand the material in a novel way. Then she tells them to try the problems at their desks and “pretend the pencils are your feet.” She gets a thank-you note from a student for her efforts.

“Yet another teacher’s meeting. Mr. Turner has someone from the board giving us workshops, an educational chiropractor here to ‘align our curriculum.’”

When Mr. Turner brings in outside “experts” to review the teachers’ work, Esme is informed that she is working to accomplish too much and should limit herself to only fourteen units. Esme decides it’s best to play along and pretend to soak in the expert’s wisdom, even though she fully intends to continue with her own plans.