Educating Esme

For our iMovie project, my group read the book Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year written by Esme Raji Codell. The book is written as a journal, recounting the joys and hurdles she faced in her first year teaching. Esme’s strong character and sense of humor seep from the pages and make for a very enjoyable read. Her passion as a teacher is inspiring. She creates a library in her classroom from her own collection of books, which she uses instead of textbooks to teach her students grammar and reading. Also she uses her own names for the various subjects such as puzzling rather than math in order to help students from becoming turned off by the name of a subject if they have struggled with it in the past. Her creativity and enthusiasm make her classroom an area where students thrive.

Esme has the unique ability to constantly think outside of the box, which leads to unusual conflict resolutions. For example, when one young man in her class who frequently causes trouble is especially troublesome she has him do her job the following day. As the student takes her role in the classroom she takes his. The boy learns how difficult her job is and how much harder he makes it when he constantly causes problems. It proves to be a great learning experience for both parties involved.

Throughout the book there are numerous other conflicts that Esme must resolve. These conflicts include those with students, faculty, parents, as well as conflicts between the students. In our iMovie, we chose to focus on Esme’s conflict resolution strategies. In order to show this, we selected four types of conflicts and then chose a situation for each from the book, which we acted out. To see our iMovie go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC2GJLtEEW0.