Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year

For our Ed. Psych class we were given the option of choosing a project of sorts to serve as our final. I chose the option of reading two education related books from our reading list and then writing a paper that ties those books into our Anita Woolfolk text book. One of the books that I read was entitled “Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year”. I found this book extremely interesting! Not only was Esme writing about teaching in an inner city school, which is something that I am interested in, she was also writing about the ‘politics’ that go along with teaching and her everyday struggles to deal with students, parents, and home situations which were anything but perfect. She has constant battles of will with the administration throughout the book which I thought was often a little bit out of line, but I guess what a Norwegian Lutheran from Wisconsin and a Chicago public school teacher consider ‘out of line’ is probably quite different. Although I had a hard time relating to Esme or being able to agree with some of the things that she describes herself as doing in the beginning of the book, by the end I was completely sold on her untraditional teaching style. It was clear that her students were learning a lot about not only the subject matter but also about who they were as people, the students were thriving in her classroom, and in the end that is what it’s all about!